Hopefully
your summer was relaxing during vacation time and you were successful
in running all the planned events and programmes for your cardholders. I
am very pleased to share with you some news about several EYCA projects
that we started in July and August and that are turning out very
satisfactory.
Based on a study visit to Macedonia, the Board has launched an e-mail
voting, in which the EYCA members will decide whether Aurora Tours will
become the Associate Member for the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia. The results of the voting will be announced after the October
Board meeting and will be adopted at the next conference.
The agenda of the Board meeting will be a follow up to the June
Executive meeting and parallel to it, the Board members will also work
in groups based on their portfolio tasks.
After the June
training session for the Trafo – Transforming Youth Information
project, the technical development of the portal is in its final stage
and the young journalists are sending in their contributions. The launch
of the Trafo site will be accompanied by a media campaign, so you will
receive more news about it from the office shortly.
On the European level, EYCA had the opportunity to discuss our role in
the implementation of the new EC policy on youth in Brussels. We are
continuously working on an active involvement in cooperation with the
Three Networks – ERYICA, Eurodesk and the European Youth Forum.
You can read all about the upcoming busy autumn in this issue of the
EYCAtcher and together with the office, we are looking forward to
hearing your feedback and impressions.
Warm regards,
Wolfgang Schick
EYCA President
Following
the decision on the new EYCA logo and its use during the EYCA General
Assembly in Wales, the EYCA office finalized the graphic chart outlining
all the changes. The reDesign Manual is divided into three sections –
an introduction describing the re-design process and its time line; the
two key parts focus on the use of the new logo on card as well as in
print and on the web. The new Manual is easy to navigate and member
organisations can instantly find all necessary details for the use of
the new EYCA logo, such as colour management, minimum size or other,
instantly.
As illustration with this article, you will find examples of new cards from
Luxembourg, Valencia and Slovenia as well as snapshots from websites where the new logo is already implemented.
The two EYCA websites have also undergone changes – they now feature the
new logo and brand name. As the European Youth Card is now up the age
of 30 in most countries, also the name EURO<26 has become somewhat
outdated. Therefore, EYCA has decided to promote the new brand name
European Youth Card for both the Association as well as for members. The
office has registered europeanyouthcard.org, which is now linked to
euro26.org and also the europeanyouthcard.xy domains for more than 35
countries in Europe for use by national card organisations.
Taking Facebook by storm
Keeping up with the fast developments in virtual space, many EYCA member
organisations now have a Facebook profile and are communicating with
their cardholders through this and other social networks. Next time when
you log on, enter “euro26” into the Facebook search engine and become a
fan of the Slovenian, Austrian, Swiss, Montenegrin, Estonian, Italian,
Maltese, German-speaking Belgian, or Finnish youth card group.
No surprise that for example the Swiss “euro26.ch” profile had 300
friends within a short time after the launch of the profile – it offers
competitions and highlights extra discounts, makes PR for interesting
events and answers cardholders’ questions online.
Another great initiative and way to boost communication with cardholders
is the new Slovenian on-line magazine 26! that you can check out at
http://ejkartica.si/sl/revija_26_e_novice/revija26/. From June on, the Ej!KArtica has been issuing the magazine with the help of an
on-line publishing programme. You can turn pages like in a hard copy
magazine but have the cool features of being able to zoom in text,
click links and much more.
INTRA_RAIL LIVE TRIP 50
Cartão Jovem – Portugal is responsible for the management of INTRA_RAIL –
a youth tourism product that combines lodging at youth hostels along
with train travel plus mobile multimedia messaging – and with a great
discount for cardholders!
In order to promote INTRA_RAIL and to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of
youth hostels in Portugal, the local youth card developed the INTRA_RAIL
LIVE TRIP 50. In this unique trip 50 young people travelled for 6 days
around Portugal – from July 28th to August 2nd - enjoying leisure
activities and having great fun. Along with the group, a video team
edited daily clips and posted them on a videoblog, and which will later
be broadcasted on a TV show. Please visit
http://live-trip50.blogspot.com/ and take a look at all the action. The participants just loved it.
From 15 October 2009 on, the French-speaking Belgium’s European Youth Card will be available.
These past months, the team has been working hard on attractive and
stimulating partnerships to offer young people in French-speaking
Belgium a chance to benefit from the same opportunity as their Flemish-
and German-speaking fellows: more culture, information and mobility.
More than a hundred advantages have been concluded so far, including
leading national institutions and firms in the cultural, travelling and
transportation, sports and leisure fields. With those, we hope to offer
more opportunities to discover Belgium to young Belgians and Europeans
alike.
But “chasing” advantages has not been the only part of the job: in
order to make sure young people can make informed choices on how to use
their card, anAgenda will be made available on the association’s website
http://www.cartejeunes.be.
Cultural and institutional partners will be able to post information on
events specifically addressed to young people and accessible with a
European Youth Card.
Carte Jeunes will be compiling, together with the French Community’s
government, an informative and practical list of services offered to
youth in French-speaking Belgium
in the fields of education, health,
sustainable energy, legal information, and more. We wish to thank our
German- and Flemish-speaking colleagues for their support, as well as
EYCA and their members. Meet us on 15 October 2009 at
www.cartejeunes.be for the launch of our European Youth Card!
On July 1-2, the EYCA Executive – Wolfgang Schick, Angela Dato and Jose
Sousa – met in the Bratislava office to discuss the current agenda.
Jose
Sousa who also serves as EYCA’s treasurer spent an additional day with
Julia Szendrei, the financial manager to review documentation,
contracts, accounting software as well as financial reporting.
The list of items discussed by Executive
and office included among others coordination of Board portfolios,
remarks and additions to business plan, EYCA’s social and environmental
commitment, quality evaluation of member organisations as well as the
creation of an “EYCA Development and Business Model” document. The
Executive also analysed EYCA’s strategies regarding white territories,
marketing and resource development.
The next EYCA Board meeting will take place in Budapest from October 2
until October 4 in connection with the Partial Agreement board meeting
that will be held in the European Youth Centre on October 5. The EYCA
Board meeting time will be divided between working groups according to
fields of interest and expertise and regular agenda.
Director
Marcel Hagmann together with Members Support Officer Stani Gajdosova
will on their next country visits travel to Hungary in October, fly to
Greece and Cyprus at the end of November and finalise this year’s
evaluation cycle in Spain. Marcel will also attend the GA of our partner
organisation Alliance of European Voluntary Organisations in Paris in
November.
On July 3, 2009, the Three Networks EYCA, ERYICA and Eurodesk met
together with the European Youth Forum to discuss the EU Strategy for
Youth – Investing and Empowering. They sent a joint statement to the EC
where they introduced their positions on the proposed policy. As follow
up, representatives of the Three Networks met with Pierre Mairesse
(Director, Education and Culture DG) whom they
elaborated on specific issues with.
The key areas that the networks are going to focus on in their
initiatives in the future are participation, youth work, a cross
sectoral approach and the use of EU tools such as structured dialogue. A
workshop for the Four Networks will take place in Bratislava in
November to further shape their involvement in youth information on
national and European level.
The
Trafo project continues as planned – after the training in Bratislava,
Trafo participants returned back home and are working on their
contributions to the portal. From the initial articles it seems that the
website will offer a great variety of topics and we hope that after the
Europe-wide promotional campaign we will be able to attract a broad
audience to it. The technical part of the portal also features a
Facebook application
that makes it possible to promote Trafo postings through this social
networking site.
For
young people who catch the vibe and will be posting their own texts and
videos to Trafo, there will be a competition for the best and most
viewed entries. The office will keep you posted but look out for the
launch of the portal at
www.europeanyouthcard.org/trafo in mid October.
As
you might know, one of our very successful long-term projects is surely
the issuing of the EURO<26 European Youth Card to all volunteers
participating in the European Voluntary Service (EVS) programme of the
European Commission.
The EURO<26 European Youth Card for EVS is a thank you to young
volunteers and has its own individual design. With the logo re-design,
the office has together with the Calder graphic company prepared a new
visual identity for the EVS card and info material.
The new colourful layout plays with the shapes of countries and creates a re-shuffled European “map”.
In the letterhead and on the envelope, we bring
Europe closer together, which is also one of the aims of EVS and EYCA:
The European Voluntary Service (EVS) provides young Europeans aged 18 to
30 with a great chance to express their commitment through unpaid,
full-time voluntary activities and the EURO<26 European Youth Card
brings them discounts on culture, travel and services.
The current EVS project runs from October 208 until September 2010 and
we expect that more than 10.000 volunteers will receive a card. We would
kindly ask the members to promote the EVS Youth Card on their websites
and use all communication channels to make it known to the discount
providers as well as to the young people.
The European Youth Card Association has received two well-founded
applications for EYCA membership in the territory of Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia from two travel agencies Aurora Tours and ZIP
Travel. On July 30 and 31, Wolfgang Schick (EYCA President) and Marcel
Hagmann (EYCA Director) visited both applicants in Skopje where they
were introduced to the key staff and held meetings in the organisations’
premises. It was very
valuable to have a “hands on” experience of both committed candidates
and to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.
In
this context, the main advantage of Aurora is the already existing name
recognition and the scale of the organistion. The EYCA Board therefore
recommends to the General Assembly Aurora Tours as the Associate member
in FYR of Macedonia. The membership procedure will continue with e-mail
voting by all EYCA member organisations.
Two very dedicated staff members from member organisations – Elif Memis
(Turkey) and João Paulo Henriques (Portugal) – are leaving the EYCA
crowd and changing jobs.
Elif will be working in the Education
Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, on Lifelong Learning:
Comenius, Grundtvig, ICT and Languages. It’s a 5 months internship
between October 2009 and February 2010.
João Paulo Henriques, the head manager of the Youth Card
Department in Portugal is changing jobs after nine years at Movijovem.
He will be working in a new project as a marketing and communication
consultant. A big thank you from all of us for your positive energy and
great ideas and the best of luck in your new work!
Also the EYCA team has changes to announce: congratulations to Juraj
Rutsek who moved to Leeds for an internship with BBC and welcome to our
new office assistant Dana Vyzinkarova.
New logo reDesign Manual
