Local AIESEC offices from Rotterdam, Bucharest, Kilimanjaro-area, and Pavia met online and discussed the topic: how to contribute to sustainable solutions in the local community? And what can we learn from projects in other cities?
AIESEC focuses on empowering young people to make a progressive social impact. It’s an international youth-run, non-governmental and not-for-profit organization that provides young people with leadership development, cross-cultural internships, and global volunteer exchange experiences. The AIESEC network includes approximately 40,000 members in over 120 countries.
AIESEC Rotterdam invited other AIESEC offices to a cross-border event: a one-day virtual event with AIESEC entities in different countries, around sharing knowledge on sustainability, inspiring each other, and sharing existing actions in different cities. The local offices from Pavia (Italy), Bucharest (Romania), and Kilimanjaro-area (Tanzania) joined the virtual event.
In the first part of the online meeting, participants were allocated to break-out rooms with people from different cities to answer some questions and share their thoughts on sustainability. In the second part, each AIESEC entity got the chance to share what their entity is doing in terms of sustainability. Each of the 4 participating offices shared 2 sustainable projects in their city that could be implemented somewhere else.
One outcome of the online meeting: cities, as well as AIESEC local committees, often cope with similar, comparable challenges, and the approaches do certainly differ. For some part, these differences relate to the local context. For another part, local offices (and cities) simply come up with other creative ideas. The exchange of these slightly different approaches and creative solutions can be highly inspirational and can work as suggestions for other locations to pick up. The participating members on behalf of their AIESEC offices indicated that they can make good use of each other’s -slightly different- approaches. For instance, to give SDG lessons in both primary as well as secondary schools. AIESEC Rotterdam might very well follow up on the initiative and consider setting up these cross-border meetings on urban knowledge exchange more often.
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