Welcome back to Kranjska Gora. I want you to once again feel the crisp air surrounding the 4th European Academy of Youth Work venue. Today, the special Slovenian green is looking even greener, if that’s even possible. The sun is shining brightly, and your skin actually feels warm, the kind of spring warm you enjoy the most.
The energy of the plenary room and the garden is vibrant, there is a lot of movement, the rhythmic sound of suitcases being dragged across the floor, the constant hum of chit-chats, and a sea of tired and genuine smiles (and already from the morning, some goodbye hugs). And yes, the coffee, as Anita noticed, today we really needed more coffee in our coffees.
We’ve officially moved from the fog of the first day to the clarity of the last. This is the last Academy in this cycle of European youth programmes, and as Darko painted, we are standing at the edge of an unbuilt bridge. We don’t know if the Academy will happen again or what the roadmap for creating spaces for rethinking youth work will be, but as we moved from the fog of the first day to the clarity of the last, the picture is getting just a bit clearer.
And let’s not forget, signals from the future come from rooms like this.
Mireille van Bremen translated our collective energy and inputs of the Academy into a beautiful vision board, bringing us right in the eye of the storm (and the board was also a bit of a sci-fi themed, joyfully appreciated by the author of this blog). The board presented a future that is both challenging, unpredictable and full of potential. We leave with the echoes of raised questions: Will we embrace this chaos to build new narratives, or will we stay silent? Can we find the little spaces of courage to act politically, even when it means biting the hand that feeds us?
Darko brought us back to earth with an agricultural perspective, to look at the Academy’s contribution as a way of making the soil of youth work just a bit more fertile. As he reminded us, we don’t sell fruit at the Academy, but collect seeds. And the real work is taking your seed and planting it back home, in your own community and your own context.
So we leave Kranjska Gora with one final commitment, a seed of action one can take to bring futures thinking into our work. We committed to experimentation, being political, coaching for our own and collective future and wellbeing, co-creating spaces for and with young people, staying open to the things that are coming, playing and letting go, and to sum it all up, Markus captured the essence of our responsibility in the simplest way possible: doing our job.
We welcomed to the stage Juha Teubl-Kiviniemi and Hilary Tierney, EAYW Advisory Board members who thoroughly collected inputs these few days, for their final observations. They reminded us how the Academy has kept reinventing itself over the years, moving away from standard formats and into the deep dives and intentionally leaning into the discomfort where honest dialogue happens. Along the way, it has made a significant contribution to the youth sector, producing a wealth of resources, research, books and tools.
To the great delight of this blog’s author, Juha also dropped a few Sci-Fi references, but I’ll keep you in suspense and save those for the very end. For now, I will leave you with this quote from his speech that kind of sums up the Academy’s intention: “When dialogue generates discomfort, it means that it’s working.”
Then came the closing speech from our Sonja Mitter Škulj. As always, it was the emotional heart of the event, met with loud applause in appreciation of her effort in making the Academy what it is today.
Sonja left us with two key points to carry forward:
Seeds of Action: Whether or not the Academy continues as a project, we must keep creating spaces to think together and talk about the future.
Impact: It is vital to look at how we have changed, both as individuals and as a community, what we are doing with the “seeds” we’ve gathered and how they will be useful moving forward.
Now, before closing this journey, I invite you to once again take a deep breath, feel the crisp, thin air and spring sun of Slovenia. I am taking you (or reminding you) of the moment an EAYW participant leaves the venue.
You’re standing there with your suitcase, already missing some of the people you just spent these intense days with. Your mind is drifting towards trip logistics, buses, flights, trains and the journey home, while you feel overwhelmed and calm at the same time. It feels like you just went to a market and bought a lot of ingredients from your shopping list, along with some unplanned ones that just looked too tasty to pass up. Now you’re starting to plan what to cook with it all.
As we continue walking this unbuilt bridge of the Academy’s future together, let’s also find the time to leave the questions aside and remember what it is all about in the end: being that one trusted person a young person needs.
And until we discover where the bridge is taking both us and the Academy, a promised sci-fi quote by Arthur C. Clarke (thank you Juha!):
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”