As I wrap up another conference in a long consecutive string of conferences, I wanted to look back on my experience as a whole.
After my last conference (in 2009) I decided to call it quits. I had been invovled with the TYA organisation for two years and in that time had attended 3 conferences and a symposium and I had just gotten tired of the ordeal. I had been approached on numerous occasions asking if I was going to be the next conference and if I wanted to help run the conferece (serve as a deputy president) but I kept declining, citing one reason after the other always trying to steer away from or bend the truth that I just didn't want to come back, feeling that I would be ostracized for some sort of minor betrayal.
The reason why I didn't want to come back was very simple; I had been involved in 3 groups projects with lofy goals (each from a separate conference) and each one had crashed and burned either because of apathy of the partso of the students or the possibility of the task and I had had enough. The worst part of the projects was that I knew going it that most of these projects were logistically impossible which made it even harder to keep going back. With all that said, I did go back, of my own free will even.
Why, you may ask, would I return to the very conference that had frusterated so much of the last two years of my life? Well, the answer is very simple. I love it. Earlier this year, about the same time that I started shopping around for a winter term project, Emilie O'Herne, January's president contacted me changes in the format of the TYA 14 conference and I was immediately hooked. Instead of all the participants working on one project, they each were going to work on separate 'individual' projects where the incentive and focus wasn't so much on direct action, but on giving the youth actors the grassroots skills that are viable for creating and implementing a political project from scratch. Also, it was going to be heavily workshop based and would give a lot more time for discussion and speakers as opposed to computer driven research. Essentially, the new format changed everything that I hadn't liked about TYA to what I had originally though it should be.
Throughout the week though, my passion waxed and waned at one point almost snapped. There certainly were some moments in which I felt overwhelmed by everything that was going on or as if I just couldn't handle what was on my plate at the time. However, these times were very much in the minority and for the most part I had a blast. As I mentioned in the committee summary (which can be found here) our participants came from 9 countries and hugely diverse political and cultural backgrounds but sharing a common interest in the issues in Gender Issue. Because of this huge breadth of experience, the conference was amazing I really felt that I learned so much about all the cultures of the participants I had the privilege of working with. Truly just spending a week talking with someone from a very different walk of life (compared to yourself) is an eye-openning and deeply introspective experience — you learn a lot about them, but often times you learn even more about yourself.
At the end of it all, I would have to say I really enjoyed the conference. Especially when listening to my participants rave about how much they loved the conference, I really felt so accomplished and proud to have gotten my way through another tough week or little sleep, fewer breaks, non-stop politics. What I always find most satisfying about this conference though, and has a lot to do with the overarching reasons that I keep coming back to TYA and to Den Haag, where the conference is held is the very real chance I have to make a difference.
In the world of politics (international, national, regional, local) youth actors are making bigger and bigger waves and in these last few years especially they are truly becoming the most important driving force in the political arena. However, as true is this may be, the are still under appreciated and underutilized. The intensely patriarchal, ageist engine that is politics often sees the youth as nothing more than a non-voting, apathetic, moderately amusing demographic. They are naive in the eyes of the world and are self-interested and dependent solely on the older and wiser members of society to make decisions for them because they lack the knowledge or even interest to make them for themselves. This concept may have been true a couple of decades or maybe even the last generation of people to grow up but that is definitely not the case now and in my mind, that is what TYA is really all about; changing that one sided discourse into a dialogue, forcing people to talk with you and not at you. Making your voice heard by doing some sort of action be it giving a speech or holding a fundraiser is really quite easy and when I see young people's eyes light up when they realise this - that is what makes all the work (before and during the conference) worth it.
When the phrase "the sky's the limit" ceases being a trite idiom and becomes an axiom for life, that is when I feel as if I have succeeded and hearing all my participants chatter excitedly with one another during the last two days we had together about all their plans and how everything was going to work out really brought a smile to my face and a warmness to my heart and I knew that somewhere, no matter how small, I had made a difference, in someone's life that week.
After my last conference (in 2009) I decided to call it quits. I had been invovled with the TYA organisation for two years and in that time had attended 3 conferences and a symposium and I had just gotten tired of the ordeal. I had been approached on numerous occasions asking if I was going to be the next conference and if I wanted to help run the conferece (serve as a deputy president) but I kept declining, citing one reason after the other always trying to steer away from or bend the truth that I just didn't want to come back, feeling that I would be ostracized for some sort of minor betrayal.
The reason why I didn't want to come back was very simple; I had been involved in 3 groups projects with lofy goals (each from a separate conference) and each one had crashed and burned either because of apathy of the partso of the students or the possibility of the task and I had had enough. The worst part of the projects was that I knew going it that most of these projects were logistically impossible which made it even harder to keep going back. With all that said, I did go back, of my own free will even.
Why, you may ask, would I return to the very conference that had frusterated so much of the last two years of my life? Well, the answer is very simple. I love it. Earlier this year, about the same time that I started shopping around for a winter term project, Emilie O'Herne, January's president contacted me changes in the format of the TYA 14 conference and I was immediately hooked. Instead of all the participants working on one project, they each were going to work on separate 'individual' projects where the incentive and focus wasn't so much on direct action, but on giving the youth actors the grassroots skills that are viable for creating and implementing a political project from scratch. Also, it was going to be heavily workshop based and would give a lot more time for discussion and speakers as opposed to computer driven research. Essentially, the new format changed everything that I hadn't liked about TYA to what I had originally though it should be.
Throughout the week though, my passion waxed and waned at one point almost snapped. There certainly were some moments in which I felt overwhelmed by everything that was going on or as if I just couldn't handle what was on my plate at the time. However, these times were very much in the minority and for the most part I had a blast. As I mentioned in the committee summary (which can be found here) our participants came from 9 countries and hugely diverse political and cultural backgrounds but sharing a common interest in the issues in Gender Issue. Because of this huge breadth of experience, the conference was amazing I really felt that I learned so much about all the cultures of the participants I had the privilege of working with. Truly just spending a week talking with someone from a very different walk of life (compared to yourself) is an eye-openning and deeply introspective experience — you learn a lot about them, but often times you learn even more about yourself.
At the end of it all, I would have to say I really enjoyed the conference. Especially when listening to my participants rave about how much they loved the conference, I really felt so accomplished and proud to have gotten my way through another tough week or little sleep, fewer breaks, non-stop politics. What I always find most satisfying about this conference though, and has a lot to do with the overarching reasons that I keep coming back to TYA and to Den Haag, where the conference is held is the very real chance I have to make a difference.
In the world of politics (international, national, regional, local) youth actors are making bigger and bigger waves and in these last few years especially they are truly becoming the most important driving force in the political arena. However, as true is this may be, the are still under appreciated and underutilized. The intensely patriarchal, ageist engine that is politics often sees the youth as nothing more than a non-voting, apathetic, moderately amusing demographic. They are naive in the eyes of the world and are self-interested and dependent solely on the older and wiser members of society to make decisions for them because they lack the knowledge or even interest to make them for themselves. This concept may have been true a couple of decades or maybe even the last generation of people to grow up but that is definitely not the case now and in my mind, that is what TYA is really all about; changing that one sided discourse into a dialogue, forcing people to talk with you and not at you. Making your voice heard by doing some sort of action be it giving a speech or holding a fundraiser is really quite easy and when I see young people's eyes light up when they realise this - that is what makes all the work (before and during the conference) worth it.
When the phrase "the sky's the limit" ceases being a trite idiom and becomes an axiom for life, that is when I feel as if I have succeeded and hearing all my participants chatter excitedly with one another during the last two days we had together about all their plans and how everything was going to work out really brought a smile to my face and a warmness to my heart and I knew that somewhere, no matter how small, I had made a difference, in someone's life that week.
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