The charter of EUROPEA is…
… a document where we lay out the mission, the vision and the values of EUROPEA. It could be our instrument for Public Relations.
During the meeting in Cluj-Napoca…
… we turned our eyes into our own organization asking ourselves what values and “shining stars” WE want to find there, asking what we want EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS to see when they learn to know EUROPEA for the first time, and examine if other EUROPEA members share our thoughts.
The Executive Committee together with our national coordinators and the audience of two EUROPEA international meetings have so far contributed in a process where one aim is to strengthen our self-consciousness of what EUROPEA is for each one of us, and also to find out what we want it to be or want it to become.
After several discussions during the last year and an open and energy-filled brainstorming among all participants of EUROPEA meeting in Austria, October 2018, our General secretary Elisabeth Hönigsberger summarized the process so far at the EUROPEA meeting in Cluj-Napoca in Romania:
– We have statutes that provide us with our legal basis, organizational structure and aims.
– We have gone through a process where we have decided on a strategic plan for the next few years on how we want to work to reach our aims; to encourage and facilitate training and exchange of students and teachers, to arrange student competitions, to work for continuous education and cooperation between the professional world and education, to mention some.
– And we have identified our internal and external stakeholders.
Now it is time to take a closer look at our values
We are an organization with more than 1000 member schools from 25 countries. Though we all are Europeans, our schools still face different everyday realities and challenges. But: we all believe in cooperation to solve these challenges, and to cooperate to provide our students with the best and most up dated education achievable.
So what are our common values? What do we share, and what words can we choose to make these values easy to see for teachers and students inside our organization, as well as EU politicians and other stakeholders outside EUROPEA?
Sustainability… Including… Nature-minded… Internationally oriented …
After an hour of energy-filled discussion, the groups came up with several keywords and sentences. The word cloud below gives an idea of what we talked about:
The next step…
… is that the Executive Committee will read the result from the group work carefully and try to find words that can represent our values. The process will continue in Finland, and we aim at finding values that impress and attract both internal and external stakeholders! – Nothing less…..
