RIGHT TO REPRESENTATION: the last activity of the EYF Workplan 2014
What does representation mean? Who do school student organisations represent and how? Is there a “right” to representation? Do individual have to choose or organisations have a duty to represent everyone? How to ensure that organisations truly reflect the voice of its members/school students?
These were some of the questions that a group of around 40 representatives from OBESSU Member, Candidate and Partner Organisations explored during the conference Right to Representation, 5-12 December, in Vilnius. This was organised in cooperation with Lietuvos moksleivių sąjunga (LMS) and the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe (EYF). The event followed up on the previous “study visits” taking place in Kosovo, Prague and Riga earlier this year, where the topics of representation and participation were also discussed.
The event aimed on the one hand at enabling school students to actively participate in democratic life in their school as well as in wider society: Reflecting on how school students’ participation in all discussions and all decision-making affecting their life must be guaranteed and improved; exploring the importance of connecting with wider civil society; raising interest in participating in policy-making at different levels and encourage participants to get involved in these processes through giving input to policy-makers. On the other hand, Right to Representation aimed at critically reflect on the representativeness of school student organisations at local, national and European level: encouraging participants to critically reflect on the representativeness of their own organisations, including the representation of underrepresented groups; exploring the role of school student organisations in increasing engagement on parliamentary politics and thereby in the long run increase young voter turnout at elections; developing an OBESSU resolution on the topic and coming up with concrete action plans. Challenging aims and objectives introduced the participants to a challenging and full-time working week.
The participants from all over Europe started the first day of the event exploring democracy and its different forms. It was a very introductory step but it established the ground stones for the upcoming week. Representative and direct democracy were recurrent concepts that appeared during the whole week and that brought interesting and fruitful discussions and debates.
The next steps of Right to Representation drove participants through the reflection on what is active participation and through a critical reflection on their home organisations: What are school student unions representing? What are school student rights? Who are school student unions representing? Are school student organisations truly representative? How do they represent school students? Why are school student activists taking a step forward to fight for school student rights?
These sessions were followed with a deeper discussion on the students that are usually underrepresented such as migrant students, students with certain disabilities or low-income school students and strategies were defined to continue working on the representation of these collectives of people. With the diagnosis completed, participants were then asked to peer-support each other and an open space for problem solving was created. School student activists shared their home strategies and connected ideas, challenges and possible solutions trying to learn from each other.
The next steps in Right to Representation moved back on reflecting on the work and role of school student unions. On the one hand, exploring advocacy and lobbying work of school student unions; and on the other, with Albert Claret, the invited guest speaker expert on Youth Participation and President of the Local Youth Council of Barcelona (Consell de la Joventut de Barcelona). Albert Claret introduced youth participation as a process in which young people has to know how to take part, have to want to do it, and have to have the means to do it. It was a provoking session that generated a very engaged debate on the role of school student unions, its political affiliations (if there are any), its ideas and ways of taking action.
Once the main challenges were identified, Right to Representation moved on to step forward on providing strategies and concretion on how school student unions can work to become more representative structures and organisations. Representation was identified to be a long-term process where alliances and cooperation have to be put in place. Other youth organisations and National Youth Councils can be good companions with better expertise in certain issues that can help our school student organisations to better represent all students.
The last parts of the event continued with the focus on the outcomes. The first step was the creation of tools for OBESSU Member, Candidate and Partner Organisations. These tools will be used in the upcoming year in OBESSU and the revision of the already existing Manual for School Student Unions, and are hoped to be useful for many more school students all over Europe. The second step was a creative and intense work on a resolution that would serve as OBESSU stand on the topic, to be adopted in the next statutory meeting. The third and last step was a thorough action planning where participants were asked to develop concrete plans on how would they bring their learning back home.
More pictures can be found on Facebook.
