You can find more details on Global Education and the GLEN cycle here.

The GLEN cycle 2013 counts 104 participants in total from Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland. Their participation is financed by the German Ministry of Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery, the Slovak MFA, the Czech MFA and the Slovene Local Authority of Ljubljana.

The German French Office for Youth (OFAJ) kindly finances for the 10th time this year the participation of the young German-French tandems in the GLEN-GeCo seminars. The German-Czech Future Fund finances the participation of the German-Czech tandems in the GLEN Anglo seminars.

We wish all participants and team members great seminars, lots of exchanges, critical discussions, reflection and learning experiences!

The members of the Forum are appointed by national platforms and networks, and meet twice a year, usually in Spring and Autumn. The Forum establishes common strategies to strengthen Development Education in Europe. The DARE Forum initiated the DEEEP project back in 2003.

As GLEN is not a single-nation platform, it currently has an observer status in the DARE Forum. Network officer András Martoni represents GLEN on the meeting.

More about the DARE Forum

I want to know more about the role of the Global Education Practice in the cycle

I want to see videos about GEAs

We are also tied up on making arrangements ready for the four-day RENew Seminar and the preceding Members’ Assembly, coming up on the 20th March in Budapest, Hungary. RENew stands for review, engage, network and it’s the closure seminar of the 2012 Multipliers Training Cycle, where all participants meet after their internships in the South to evaluate their cycle experience. The seminar will also give place to the annual Photo Competition, where the spotlight is on TRIALOG’s Code of Conduct that GLEN uses to raise awareness on ethical communication.

In the meantime, this is also the part of the year for participants to conduct their GEAs – global education activities – to become a GE multiplier and receive a certificate as a result on the RENew. You can find many video examples of last years’ GEA on our website at: http://glen-europe.org/?page_id=1068

Not yet a GEA but a very good start: here’s the freshest project from Kenya / Poland. Piotr Chmilewski has just finished the last touch on the short animation movie, which is the result a series of workshops held in Nairobi by host organisation MYSA (Mathare Youth Sport Association). Youth from Mathare and Eastleigh were asked to animate a popular local folk tale. The video speaks for itself!

Authors:Emmanuel Oketch, Lucy Wanjiru Wamboi, Amos Muli, Charles Nyamumbo, Felix Momanyi, Aden Mohamed Gedi, Hadija Veta, Piotr Chmielewski Music: Wojtek Urbański

So, watch or…even better…close your eyes and discover your voice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnm0tb-myWM (you can turn on English subtitles)

1. GLENweb developments
2. Forum of GE Multipliers
3. 2nd Global Education Congress, Lisbon
4. 2nd Annual Event – a place to meet
5. GLEN and its Partners
6. PAH celebrates its 20th Anniversary
7. GLEN network update
8. 2013 – 10th cycle

1. GLENweb developments
We talked a lot about GLENweb in the Network as one of the major advancements of the year. End of May the new version was launched, based on a Buddypress framework (this is the social media version of WordPress, a popular online software to create websites and blogs), customised to our needs.

GLENweb is a structured storage place of important documents: you can find (almost) everything here: travel reimbursement sheets, internship and event reports, meeting minutes, pictures and videos, as well as global education tools and materials.

GLENweb is also a social media platform to connect Glennies from all generations, get information about internships, Global Education activities, other projects, etc.. GLENGroups is a feature that supports them to plan actions and meetings: it gathers people along a specific theme or subject. It also serves as a classical Internet „forum” or message board.

You can read more about GLENweb’s first ever online forum discussion related to the Annual Event and „GLEN and its Partners” in this newsletter.

András Martoni GLEN network officer (andras@glen-europe.org)
Marine Caron, ASA-Programm, Engagement Global (marine.caron@engagement-global.de)

2. Forum of GE Multipliers
The Forum of GE Multipliers is a NGO created in 2010 by former Glennies and other Global Education multipliers in order to support Global Education in Europe. 2012 was a hard working and enriching year for the Forum, well deserved harvest of efforts as well as the preparation of new plans.

The first part of the year was dedicated to organise the grand tour of Sailing for Sustainability (SfS, sailingforsustainability.net), which covered a sailing trip with lots of global education activities in the Baltic region. As the project team describes, “intensive workshops and discussions about alternative economy, renewable energy and sustainable lifestyle, actions in the harbours, exciting group dynamics, meeting and exchanging new ideas with people from all around Europe … more than 100 people from more than 10 European countries were involved in the planning and organisation of the project. Three preparation seminars with a total of 80 participants were held before the sailing started and another one took place in autumn this year to evaluate the entire project.
15 partner organisations from different European countries were involved in the development and implementation. Altogether around 120 people participated in the seminar weeks on the ship. During sailing we stopped in five European countries: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. Many people participated in our local events along the route starting in Gdansk and heading up to Hel, Klaipeda, Liepaja, Ventspils, Salacgriva, Pärnu, Virtsu, Vormsi, Tallin, Prangli, Lillö, Barösund, Hanko, Kasnäs with our final stop in Turku.We spent around 80.000 Euros and more than 22 months to make the whole thing happen.”

In the second part of the year, the Forum of GE Multipliers was registered as an official NGO in Germany and held its members assembly during the GLEN Annual Event in November. Many participants joined the Forum, and this time formally, signed up as members. The Forum also started to plan its next global education action, a European bike trip: the Cycling for Commons 2013! Get engaged!

Forum of the GE Multipliers’ website: http://www.ge-forum.org
Forum of GE Multipliers on GLENweb: http://www.glen-web.org/groups/forum-949777396/
Cycling for Commons 2013 on GLENweb: http://www.glen-web.org/groups/forum-949777396/cycling-for-commons-2013/

3. 2nd Global Education Congress, Lisbon
Education, Interdependence and Solidarity in a Changing World

Janis Kirpitis (GLEN Latvia) and András Martoni (GLEN network officer) represented GLEN on the 2nd Global Education Congress held in Lisbon, Portugal on the 27th – 28th September 2012. The event was to follow up the ten-year old Maastrict Declaration on the European strategy to support and promote global education.

The Congress’ programme was divided between plenary sessions and single and multi stakeholder group meetings with governmental, NGO and academic stakeholders. Practitioners, such as teachers, present on the Congress advocated for a separate stakeholder group. A much debated plenary speech was given by Indian private foundation owner Manish Jain from “The People’s Institute for rethinking Education and Development” who explained why he sees that education is a tool to transform students to conform the needs of the industrial societies (and organisations) and in the meantime devaluate traditional values. The discussion panel following the speech was moderated by Tobias Troll, former Glennie and advocacy officer of DEEEP3 project of the CONCORD DARE Forum.

The Congress was supported by the European Commission and organised by the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe, the Global Education Network Europe (GENE) and the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD). Local partners were IPAD – Camões – Institute for Co-operation and Language, the University of Lisbon and the Portuguese NDGO Platform.

If you wish to know more, please visit the Global Education Congress’ official website: www.gecongress2012.org or send your questions to Janis Kirpitis (janis@glen.lv) and András Martoni (andras@glen-europe.org).

4. 2nd Annual Event – a place to meet
GLEN’s top networking seminar, the Annual Event was held in Slovenia from 8th till 11th November 2012 with sixty participants.

Above meeting, sharing projects and ideas, the main focus of the seminar was to contribute to the discussion on the cooperation between GLEN and the hosting organisations (Partners). For that, we were pleased to have Martial Kouderin (Benin) and Stanislas Bineli (Cameroon) among us.

Discussions were divided in three workshops, namely (1) the relationship of GLEN and the Partners, (2) how could we make global education (GE) more global, and (3) communication, evaluation and feedback among GLEN and the Partners. All three workshops were a true success, thanks to the committed participants and the excellent moderation of Judith Blume, Kasia Szeniawska and Magdalena Mazurek..

Open space discussions covered a wide range of topics. Some derived from the event’s main topic such as “Partners in the GLEN Anglo structure”, “local (host country) intern” and to find a substitute for the ambiguous term of EAD (education au développment = education for development), which is the currently used French term for global education. Others covered sustainable seminar, unconditional basic income, crowdsourcing, privileges within EU, etc. See the full list and the meeting minutes, posters on GLENweb, under the GLENGroup “Annual Event 2012” (http://www.glen-web.org/groups/annual-event-2012/)!

Other highlights of the Event included the first members assembly of the now registered official NGO Forum of GE Multipliers. You can read more of the Forum and the next planned GE action, the bike trip, in this newsletter and on GLENweb.

We have also started the process to update the GLEN strategy paper in 2013. As the previous strategy has expired, the Members Assembly meeting decided to enter into a renewal process. The open call was made during the seminar for participants to join. The group is formulating its schedule and agenda and will soon announce its plan to proceed and the ways for all to contribute.

The 2nd Annual Event was made possible by the financial contribution of ASA-Programm, Engagement Global (Germany) and BRECI (France) and the in-kind contribution of the host organisation Zavod Voluntariat. Thank you! Special thanks go to Tina Trdin and Urban Presker for the flawless organisation.

5. GLEN and its Partners
2012 was a great year for a special relationship: GLEN and the host organisations (Partners). But aren’t they a lot more than hosts? What would be the work of GLEN without its Partners? What role do they play would they like to play in the Network? How do GLEN and the Partners communicate? What does this communication tell us about the power relations within this partnership? How can we handle the global power gap within GLEN? What would we like to change within this partnership?

All these questions already came up within GLEN in 2011 but it was in 2012 that they were discussed on a broader level: on the Members Assembly, the Train the Trainers Seminar and especially on the 2nd Annual Event, which was dedicated to this topic. Together with two Partners’ representatives (from Benin and from Cameroon) sixty Glennies discussed these general and specific questions and some times very concrete propositions for three days. All this is not yet finished, the discussion continues – on GLENweb, in the Strategy Process, with an evaluation internship in Cameroon and more! (more information: http://www.glen-web.org/groups/participants/glen-and-the-southern-partners/)

Judith Blume (judithblume@gmx.de)

6. PAH celebrates 20th Anniversary
20 years ago Polish Humanitarian Action sent its first convoy to Sarajevo. It is an excellent occasion to thank everyone, who has supported PAH over these twenty years, and also to thank all the people, who have joined PAH in creating the organisation. The main celebrations of the anniversary took place 7-8 December 2012 in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. The international conference “Key challenges of Humanitarian Aid and Development cooperation in the 21st century” was organised. It was supported by Globally Local Festival and benefit concert. Specially for this occasion the song “Uwaga, uwaga” was written and sung by Polish artists.
Pictures from the Globally Local Festival you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151130815630308.434540.26479200307&type=3.
Song “Uwaga, uwaga”, you can watch on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PC-l0T-9mw.

Lukasz Bartosik, PAH national coordinator (lukasz.bartosik@pah.org.pl)

7. GLEN network update
Significant changes mark GLEN’s development in 2012 as you might have read already in the newsletter (new GLENweb, registered Forum of GE Multipliers, enhanced discussions on GLEN and its Partners, strategy update for 2013, etc.), however, there were other changes in the structure of GLEN, which were less discussed but obviously equally important. The Maltese NGO Third World Group has terminated its membership in October as they will not be able to allocate resource in 2013 to continue their contribution to the Network. We are very sad to see them leaving and wish them all the best for their future work! In the meantime, organisational and structural changes occurred in Slovakia. The NGO GLEN Slovakia was founded by former Slovakian Glennies,, which according to the Autumn Members Assembly is now a full member of the Network.

Furthermore, mid 2012 the fabulous Anne Schollmeyer resigned from the network officer position to meet new challenges. Her successor to the role is András Martoni. Thank you Anne for your dedicated and excellent work!

8. 2013 – 10th cycle!
Believe it or not, we’ll be having the 10th GLEN cycle in 2013! Unlike from the preceding years, we have already selected the lead facilitators and tutors in December, Participants could apply until the 10th January 2013. The RENew seminar is well underway, the core team has already met in Berlin to start organising the event. We have also fixed the venue in Budapest, Hungary: the seminar will take place in the Csillebérc Youth Centre that is in a hilltop forest area in suburban Budapest. Seminar dates are 20th – 24th March 2013.