Groningen

Si vous avez un peu suivi les posts précédents (oui, j'ai un rythme d'écriture tout à fait exceptionnel ces jours ci), vous aurez compris que j'ai passé la semaine dernière à Groningen, charmante ville tout au nord des Pays-Bas. Groningen est une très jolie ville – bien plus jolie qu’Eindhoven, ce qui n’est pas bien difficile, me direz vous (eh oui, je n’ai toujours pas mis de photos d’Eindhoven ici, vous vous demandez pourquoi ^^ ?). De jolis bâtiments de briques et des canaux partout.

Pour le récit de la semaine... Je l'ai déjà fait en anglais pour mon Local Group d'adoption, Eindhoven, et comme je suis un peu faignante je vais vous le copier/coller - ça vous fera réviser votre anglais^^. En prime, vous aurez le récit le plus long de ce blog ! D'avance, toutes mes excuses aux anglicistes pour les fautes qui n'auront pas manqué de s'y glisser. La valeur ajoutée que vous avez ici par rapport au site d'Interactie, ce sont mes photos (les quelques unes que j'ai prises, je n'en ai vraiment pas des masses) et même une super vidéo pour vous montrer un peu l'ambiance!

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From the 17th till the 22nd of May, around 40 ESTIEMers gathered in Groningen to be during a week living examples of the ESTIEM motto “Work hard, play hard”. What did they do exactly? Let me explain…

You know that ESTIEM is a network composed of 64 Local Groups, and lead by a European team we call “Central ESTIEM”. This organisation wouldn’t be that strong without interface people to hold the contact between the local and the central level: the Local Responsibles. Three years ago, a new kind of event was created to give them all the tips, contacts and knowledge they need to carry through their essential role in ESTIEM: the Local Responsible Forum was born.

Local Group Groningen, and especially 5 hyper efficient and motivated people – Lieuwe, Laurianne, Kirsten and Mark, lead by Daan – took the challenge to organise the third edition. The result ? An amazing event we’ll never forget.

First of all, thanks to Daan’s hard job and the support from Central ESTIEM, they managed to get the very first grant allocated by the European Union (through the Youth in Action Program) to an ESTIEM event. An amazing amount of money which covered an important part of the travel costs of all the participants, but also financed a lot of great team building activities !

Well, let me start again from the beginning and my arrival in train in Groningen, together with Geoffrey and Louise (who both live partly in Eindhoven at the moment ;)). As trainers, we arrived in Groningen one day before the participants, to prepare the week altogether. We were welcomed by the organisers – who hosted us all for the night – and Aaro from Local Group Tampere, our trainer coordinator. Around eleven the following day, we moved to the hostel to check in, and then to the university to start working. After an afternoon of team building, training review and goal settings, all the trainers were ready to start a great event !

Thus, on Monday evening, we came back to the hostel to meet and welcome all the participants. After a restaurant specialised in all types of burgers, we all moved to a bar where we had an entire room booked only for us. With funny get to know each other games, organised by our event coordinator Louise, and very cheap beers – and even free drinks after a while, I guess we all spent a very good evening !

The next four days were all built on the same pattern : trainings during all the morning (yes, ESTIEMers can wake up at 7.00 even if they had a looooooong night), lunch (I mean, dutch lunch... sandwiches !), and then trainings again. As a trainer, I was either giving trainings or working for important ESTIEM issues in another room, so I’m probably not the best person to talk about the trainings themselves... However, I can tell you already that we covered a wide range of subjects, from a general introduction about ESTIEM to project management techniques, via cultural differences, motivation and recruitement, communication, IT, PR and branding and fundraising. We also had a presentation about the Youth in Action program, to understand what this program is and how to make the best of it in our Local Groups, and a presentation by HP (event partner), where we learnt more about this big company, the opportunities it offers, and how to become a CEO ! In all these activities, the participants were really active and dynamic... and overall they learnt a lot, according to the feedback they gave us (I forgot to mention that we bothered them into giving us feedback all the time ^^).

“Living examples of the ESTIEM motto”, I said at the beginning... Now you know more about “Work hard”. Do you think we forgot to party hard as well? No, we didn’t! (ESTIEMers never do.) Every day we did something different, and every day it was something great. On Tuesday we had a lot of fun playing bowling, before discovering Groningen night life in an interesting bar tour – we even tried an ice bar ;).

On Wednesday afternoon, we had the best city tour ever: Bierfiets!! In a city tour, you are generally the one taking pictures of the surroundings. In this case, it was Groningen people who took pictures of us – 3 moving bars, full of crazy ESTIEMers, loads of beer and loud party music, cycling around in the quiet street in the middle of the afternoon.

After a middle party (how do you call something which is not a pre party, not an after party, but something in the middle of two great parties???) in the hostel and a good dinner, we were in the perfect mood for a karaoke night. Our dear Finnish Boardies, Antti and Terhi, arrived in the middle of the night to party with us – the following morning, they picked up Geoffrey and Sebastian to continue their road trip to Valencia, Spain.

Two nights left! Do you think that Groningen people could have invented something even crazier that what we had before? Again: yes they can! On Thursday evening, after climbing the Martini tower, we had all-you-can-eat pancakes on a very old and beautiful ship, followed by a very funny salsa lesson – good teambuilding again. Afterwards, all the ESTIEMers were hyper motivated for their next challenge: to apply the knowledge their gained in the “Motivation and Recruitment” training to recruit new members for Local Group Groningen in their Social Drink. And we were really happy to see a big bunch of Eindhoven people arriving this same night to continue the party with us!!

On Friday afternoon, we had the perfect activity to relax after a tiring (exhausting?) week: sailing on a lake near Groningen. The weather was just perfect and we really enjoyed our time there. But the perfect conclusion was still to come: we suited up for a great Gala Dinner in a fancy restaurant. There, everybody thanked everybody else – and especially the organizers – for the great time we had so far; we received the certificate of the event, and moved to a fancy club to party as long as we (still) could...

It was over already. The following morning, we received the general feedback of the participants and said goodbye to everyone. The end of a truly unforgettable week... which only came true thanks to the dedication of a really amazing organisation team, the hard work of 10 trainers supported at any time by an highly energetic event coordinator, and the involvement of all the participants!