In 2017, we launched the very first edition of IGLYO’s now famous flagship capacity-building event: the Activist Academy. Organised in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with our Member Jugendnetzwerk Lambda, this five-day intensive training programme explicitly targeted younger, less experienced LGBTQI activists to provide them with confidence and skills and create a new generation of motivated LGBTQI youth leaders.
The first Activist Academy consisted of group-building activities, a menu of skills-based workshops led by experts from the international LGBTQI movement (IGLYO, All Out, ILGA Europe, TGEU, IDAHOT Committee and UN Volunteers), and a series of group challenges to put their learning into practice.
There were significant differences between this event and previous IGLYO international conferences, including: experiencing the event in smaller teams, having experienced leaders to mentor the participant teams, having almost half of the event time to just practice skills, having relevant institutional partners as skill workshops facilitators, using formal learning tracking tools and strategies to help participants internalise the learning.
These differences account for the outstanding evaluations received from the participants post-event. The evaluations and feedback on this first edition were some of the strongest IGLYO had ever received, proving the effectiveness of this new approach and the importance of repeating it in the future.
The Activist Academy Berlin 2017 was co-organised by IGLYO and our Member Jugendnetzwerk Lambda with the support of the Rights, Equality and Citizenship (REC) 2020-2014 Programme of the European Union, and the Dutch Ministry of Education Culture & Science.
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