In the last 2 months important achievements were made for youth in Austria. The support from our society OEVSV has greatly increased. After we put lots of effort into convincing them of the importance of youth.
At the general assembly of the society, youngsters were present to put pressure on the representatives of each region of Austria. They all agreed to organise youth activities with their regional youth coordinators and support the youngsters already in their regions with any activities they want to organise. Additionally, the youth coordinator on the national level secured a budget specifically for youth activities. It shows that slowly the OMs are realising that youth is the way forward.
Some other important achievements were also made:
There will be an OEVSV online learning platform so that youngsters can learn for their license exams online when and where they want to. Before we often had the problem that youngsters were interested but it was too difficult for them to learn for the exam because there were no courses near them etc. and with time, they lost interest. This online learning platform will solve this problem. On the platform there will be video lessons, but the users will also be able to ask questions and get feedback on their progress.
The youth team in Austria will create a website, which is independent from the website of the OEVSV website. There was a youth section on the society website before but that was difficult to find and there was not a lot of content on there. We want to make the website “by youngsters, for youngsters” so all the content on the site is made and written by youngsters. We have lots of great ideas for things we could do with the website. We will also make social media channels, to start off we will make an Instagram account and do our best to upload content on a weekly basis. A goal like uploading content every week is also a good motivator to go out and do something. All of our platforms will be named YOTA-Austria.
Our plan is to create a stronger youth community in Austria, at the moment very few youngsters actually know each other. Getting the support from the heads of the individual regions was key to connecting youngsters across Austria more. First of all, we will do some activities to bring the existing youngsters closer together. Once we have a group of motivated and active youngsters, we can start focusing on getting new youngsters interested in the hobby. For instance, going to schools and universities etc.
The highlight of the coming year will no doubt be a sub-regional camp in Austria. After organising the YOTA summer camp in 2016, enthusiasm about the camp was very high within the society. Now with the sub-regional camp we have the opportunity to organise a camp again. We hope to make it a large sub-regional camp with lots of cool activities and workshops.
