The Respect for  Religious Diversity: Fighting Islamophobia seminar team just finished its first preparatory meeting at the European Youth Center – Budapest this weekend. Sarah Wong (IFLRY ED), Daniel Wennick (IFLRY VP), Jelena Spasovic (Young Liberals of Serbia), Nigar Mehtiyeva (Azerbaijan Liberal Youth Association), Daniel Kaderjak (New Generation Hungary), Diego Marin (CoE Professional Trainer) and I met at the EYCB to prepare the session that we’ll be holding at the end of April.

It was only Sarah’s second seminar, but she definitely knew where she was heading. The same goes with Daniel, our new veep. With Diego’s agreement, we decided to move away from the traditional IFLRY seminar programme, with more interactive sessions, more personal work time and with a focus on younger trainers with more on-the-ground experience. We hope that the new format will please our participants, which, by the way, should hear from us in the coming few days.

In the meanwhile, it would be great to hear from participants from previous seminars or applicant participants to this one. To the former participants, we ask: how can we improve on our current model? You’ve all completed evaluation forms, which are extremely useful to us, but we also know that those are often filled in a hurry and without much time to reflect. If you would be generous enough to post your comments after this text or to send them to us via email, we would greatly appreciate more input from you as we are constantly thriving to improve our events’ format. To the young liberals who applied to participate to this event, please let us know your expectations and suggestions beforehand! We have come up with a tentative agenda, but a GREAT DEAL of work will go into making improvements in the course of the next month. We traditionally hold an “expectation” session at the beginning of our events, but it is often too late to make important changes such as which speakers are attending, or what topics will be discussed in the workshops. If you want to be heard, the time is now! Can you think of young, energetic professional who could participate as trainers? Is there a specific campaign that you have seen against islamophobia that caught your attention? Would a specific type of workshop be more useful than others in treating this specific topic? Please let us know!

Looking forward to implementing your suggestions and making this event one of the best IFLRY has ever held.

Marc