Youth Forum Academy helps its members to grow!

The Youth Forum Academy, hosted by LiJOT (the Lithuanian Youth Council) kicked off on Tuesday 17th June and will end on 21st June in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Academy, which is open to the Youth Forum’s member organisations, includes various meetings and training sessions on a variety of topics including strategic vision and plans and it aims to bring together youth organisations from across Europe so that they can learn from each other.

The first session was on the Youth Forum’s Membership Growth Project, which is a two-year pilot collaboration between the Forum and local branches of our member organisations. The project aims to help organisations grow by developing ways to gain new members and volunteers, as well as to enhance the quality of their membership.

The meeting took place on 17th -18th June and objectives included monitoring and evaluating the action plan implemented so far, developing possible changes of the action plan and assessing the training needs of participant organisations.

On the first day, the 14 attendees recapped and assessed implementation of the project so far and then identified any new needs. On Wednesday, participants discussed how to improve the implementation plan. They shared ideas on how best to learn from mistakes and successes and which actions are most important in order to ensure successful implementation. Finally, participants developed an amended action plan and identified follow up steps.

Meetings on funding, rights-based approach training, press and communication, policy development, advocacy training and the Secretary-General’s annual meeting are all still to come this week in Vilnius.

Stay tuned for updates from the Academy using #YFJAcademy on Twitter.