Serbia organized a round table on November 5-6 in Belgrade. 29 participants from 13 European countries took part in the event. The round table was officially opened by EYCA President Wolfgang Schick, Minister of Youth and Sports of Serbia, Snežana Samardžić Marković, Chief of EU delegation Vincent Degert and Deputy Director of EU integration office Srđan Majstrović.
The round table was dedicated to development of National Strategy for European Youth Card through learning from good practice examples of Catalunya, Scotland and Poland. The youth card is recognized as an instrument to get in contact with young people, especially by using up to date technologies, and therefore “educate” young people, provide them with useful information and activate them.

Young people that do not enter universities are very hard to reach since they very often do not feel as belonging to youth anymore. Nevertheless this group could profit to a high extent from offers of the Youth Card. Through youth card young individuals and unorganized young people that are not included in the work of NGOs or youth projects can be tackled.
Also, it is concluded that card as the communication channel allows not only to inform young people, but to gather information on young people.
The round table is part of wider project “Developing National Strategy for European Youth Card in Serbia”, financed by Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia, under the EU funded ‘Strengthening Serbia-EU Civil Society Dialogue’ Project. The project will have its grand finale in European Youth Card Tour which will travel through Serbia in March 2011.

As part of quality evaluation of EYCA’s member organisations, Marcel Hagmann and Stani Gajdosova visited the Spanish regions of Aragon and Valencia.
During the visit in Zaragoza (Instituto Aragones de la Juventud - Aragon Insititute of Youth), a launch of a new two-year card campaign took place. The campaign started with a press conference covered by several TV channels, radios and press media. The motto of the campaign was “Llega la línea que te acerca a que te gusta!“ – „Follow the line which will bring you closer to what you like“. In the centre of Zaragoza, a kilometre long plastic line on the ground marked the entrances to the discount providers’ shops with the campaign motto. The campaign was done in two stages - first, to raise the interest of people without using the Carnet Jove logo or any explanation. In the second phase, the city was flooded with posters, and for three days young people on segways were giving out the campaign flyers. The campaign kit included a new discount guide and brochures, a new window-sticker with both EYCA logos; all with a creative young design as well as a new classic card and bank card design. It also included a “discount pack”, with more than 80 discount vouchers with the most attractive offers in accommodation, culture, cinema, education, leisure, health and beauty, such as 2x1, free entrances and discounts between 25% and 50%. A PR and IT company from Madrid did the campaign.

The new campaign includes two main elements: changing the card validity to a flexible two-year period and a new website www.carnejoven.es with an English section, with different elements trying to bring the card closer and more useful for the young people: geolocation of all the discounts, route-planning, mobile phones application and export to social networks Facebook and Tuenty (popular social network in Spain).
 
IVAJ (Institut Valencia de la Joventut – Valencia Youth Institute) operates 16 county youth centers all around the Valencia region. We have visited the youth center in Sagunto, a small town outside of Valencia. The youth center is the first point of contact for many young people, as it offers an impressive variety of information, activities and infrastructures, such as computer and study rooms with a small library, youth information office with information on traveling, internships, volunteering opportunities, employment and the Youth Card. In the center, there are also language and entrepreneurship courses, a branch of the University office, a theater and concert hall, three music rooms and a recording studio to be freely used by all young people for a small fee.
The IVAJ can benefit from direct communication with the cardholders, thanks to the county youth centers and a large youth information center in downtown Valencia which we have visited. In the information centre 30 youth workers provide the young people daily with information on study programmes, traveling, young entrepreneurship, traveling and other quality youth information.

In September, the Council of Europe (Tina Mulcahy and Jean-Claude Lazaro) facilitated a meeting between EYCA (Marcel Hagmann) and Eurail (René de Groot, Ana Dias e Seixas). Eurail and EYCA met for the first time to get to know and understand each other’s organisations, to identify strategic synergies and potential fields of co-operation. For the future, the two organisations plan to develop further actions in case it will be decided to follow the partnership-track.
 
In October, Wolfgang Schick and Marcel Hagmann visited Hostelling International (until 2007 known as International Youth Hostel Federation IYHF) in Welwyn Garden City, near London in their offices. They met with Mikael Hansson, the CEO and Amy Wellens, the international marketing co-ordinator. The goal of the meeting was to explore potential partnership models on national and on European level.

EYCA would like to thank our partner organisation Eurodesk for inviting us to their networking meeting and general assembly in Vienna during the last weekend in October.
 
EYCA President Wolfgang Schick participated on behalf of the Association in the Third European Stakeholders’ Forum on cooperation in education, training and youth in Brussels. The event was organised by the DG Education and Culture and EUCIS-LLL (the European Civil Society Platform on Lifelong Learning) with the aim of consulting organisations on the future of the programmes Lifelong Learning, Youth in Action, Erasmus Mundus and other actions in higher education and training.
 
Board member Jarkko Lehikoinen represented EYCA during the joint colloquy of the Council of Europe and ERYICA entitled “Bridging the gap”. The aim of the colloquy was to discuss the development of Youth Information until 2010 and the future challenges as well to contribute to the start-up and development of local Youth Information Centres throughout Europe.
 

The 29th meeting of the Board of Co-ordination of the Partial Agreement on Youth Mobility through the Youth Card took place in Budapest on October 20, 2010. It was chaired by Aleksandra Mitrovic (Serbia) and co-chaired by EYCA’s President Wolfgang Schick. The meeting included a presentation from Younes ELJAOUHARI – Director of Youth, Childhood and Women Affairs in the Ministry of Youth and Sports in Morocco. Mr. Eljaouhari introduced to the government as well as EYCA representatives the youth card in Morocco (http://chababna.ma).

Ralf-Rene Weingaertner briefed the participants about developments in the Directorate Youth and Sport of the CoE and the EYCA office reported about the PA programme 2009-2011. Among several issues discussed was also the expansion strategy for the PA.
Thank you to Alexandra Cangelosi and Mugurel Stan for joining the EYCA staff for this meeting.

EYCA submitted a grant proposal for the continuation of the Trafo portal, which we would like in the future to focus on responsible travel. The project was submitted under Action 4.5, Support to information activities for young people and those active in youth work and youth organisations. Our key partners in this project will be the Slovak environmental organisation Zivica (http://zivica.sk/) and EUFED (www.eufed.org). Unfortunately, this grant proposal was not accepted.

The office sent to the European Commission the Overhead grant under Action 4.1 and a work programme for the continuation of the EVS project, which makes it possible that every EVS volunteer receives a free European Youth Card.

We would like to once again welcome to the Bratislava team our new colleague Peter Turecek who will work part time as office assistant. Peter studies a business diplomacy programme at the Faculty of International Relations (Bratislava Economic University) and speaks both English and French. We're looking forward to having him on board. We would like to warmly thank Dana Vyzinkarova for her great work and wish her the best of luck with her studies at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.

A big thank you also goes out to our volunteer Alexander Padilla Lopez who was helping out with the launch of the new website in November/December.

The General Assembly of the UN proclaimed the International Year of Youth in recognition of the need for dialogue between youth and other generations as well as among youth in different parts of the world. Now that it has been proclaimed, it is up to you to make use of this opportunity and make your voices heard.

The International Year is a fantastic opportunity to advocate on behalf of youth in your country or community and to promote dialogue and mutual understanding among youth and the decision-makers in your community, region or country.
The progress achieved during this Year in each of these areas will lay the foundation for further work in youth development, including the implementation of the World Programme of Action for Youth and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The website http://social.un.org/youthyear/index.html offers background on the IYY, possibilities to participate, links and resources as well as a calendar of events. You can also check out the facebook page of the initiative at http://www.facebook.com/UNyouthyear

The aim of the programme visit to the Russian Union of Youth was to discuss the accession of Russia to the Partial Agreement and to understand the current situation of RUY, the structure, the possibilities and to get to know the staff as well as to analyse the EYCA conference 2012 tender proposal.

During the visit, which took part in November 2010, Marcel Hagmann and Wolfgang Schick had a meeting with the deputy Minister of sport tourism and youth policy, Oleg Rozhnov on Youth Policy, the Russian Action plan 2010 and the PA. They also met with Andrey Platonov, Chairman of the Russian Union of Youth. The Director of the DYS of the Council of Europe, Mr. Weingaertner, was also present in this meeting.

The deputy Director of the Tourist and International Department R.V Alexandrov and R. Weingärtner talked about the preparation of the Action plan for 2011 implementing the framework programme for cooperation in the youth policy sphere for 2009-2012.

As part of the quality evaluation of the Russian EYCA member organisation, the office staff together with Marcel Hagmann visited the cinema network Almaz and the Samolet leisure and entertainment center. The visit was concluded by a meeting with Ruslan Galkin - Chief of department Work & Travel of "Inter Air" Ltd.

The European Year of Volunteering (EYV) has been initiated by the European Commission, which sees volunteering as a cross-sectoral issue and would like it to be connected to all walks of life from consumer protection through social inclusion to environment. More background info is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/focus/focus840_en.htm
The objectives of the EYV are to: create an enabling environment for volunteering, empower volunteer organisations, recognised volunteering activities (for individuals, on organisational and societal level), raise awareness about value and importance of volunteering.

There are 2 million euro available in funding for EYF – they will be distributed to grassroots projects within every member state and selected by National Coordination Bodies. For a full list, follow this link: http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/annexes-citizenship/doc1069_en.htm
The alliance of nineteen European networks active in volunteering and coordinated by the European Volunteer Centre (www.CEV.be) will run an EYV secretariat and are in charge of the official EYV website http://www.eyv2011.eu/
There will be a campaign surrounding the EYV which will, over a period of one year, stop for a week or two in every European capital. There is a provisional website www.eyvolunteering.eu, which explains how organisations and volunteers can join the campaign (it will later on be replaced by http://www.europa.eu/volunteering). To find out more, you can also contact the National Coordination Bodies.