The BAG EJSA and the YES Forum look back on a shared history of over 20 years and a lot of experience in working together.
The 75th anniversary of the BAG EJSA provided an additional reason to organize the Policy Event 2024 together with the YES Forum. Under the motto "The future is always", many events and projects took place as part of the BAG EJSA anniversary. A highlight was the ceremony on November 6th, 2024 in Berlin. The Policy Event from November 19th to 20th, 2024 in Brussels followed in this series and was a special additional highlight.
The embedding of the activities and political work of the BAG EJSA in the European context is not only structurally important. In the European exchange in the YES Forum network, the company's own concerns and activities are reflected and expanded and enriched in the joint discourse.
With this focus, the management of the YES Forum and the management of the BAG EJSA agreed at the beginning of 2023 that we would jointly design the Policy Event 2024. A central topic that affects many young people and which concerns the professional world of youth (social) work and "politics" is digital transformation. Digital transformation influences the lives and futures of young people.
In keeping with the principles of the YES Forum, such a topic can only be discussed and fruitfully developed together with young people. It was therefore clear that the Policy Event 2024 should be a participatory event at European level, to which young people from the member structures of the BAG EJSA and the YES Forum would not only be invited, but actively involved. A second premise was that this event must take place in a setting appropriate to the topic and the actors involved. The third criterion relates to another principle that the BAG EJSA and the YES Forum carry in their genes. This is the attitude that we are political and act and are committed to the issues of social justice and the prevention of exclusion of young people. For the event in Brussels, the connection to the political sphere had to be established.
What did this mean for the organization of the policy event?
The answer is: bringing all these strands together and fulfilling the ideas and requirements represents a very complex planning task with extensive challenges.
The YES Forum office went about the preparation and implementation very competently and with great meticulousness. There was a very close and continuous exchange between the colleagues of the YES Forum and the BAG EJSA office. Thanks to the close coordination, the logistical and content-related challenges of the program planning were successfully implemented.
The plans resulted in a high-quality program, in the preparation of which the young people were involved, which took place in central locations of the (social) political scene in Brussels. The reports during the event, as well as the feedback from the young people, the professionals and the speakers involved, show how high-class, important and interesting the meeting was.
The YES Forum team managed to put this event together in an impressive way, involving the BAG EJSA as co-organizer at all times and involving them in all questions. For the YES Forum, the principles of "participation, social inclusion and mobility" are at the heart of its actions. From the very beginning, they have determined that the inclusion of young people from the local environment to the European level is desired and possible.
For the Federal Association of Protestant Youth Social Work (BAG EJSA), which is primarily located at the national level, the active participation of young people and the exchange with them and their interests is becoming increasingly important - also based on these experiences in the YES Forum. In the anniversary year, this participation and the exchange between young people and politics became a central component. The Policy Event in Brussels made a fruitful contribution to this.
Thank you very much!
More about the "Social Cohesion in the Digital Transition" 2024 Policy Event
