Dear all
First of all I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 2017 is fading and soon we can look back at a year with a lot of activities in AIEJI. In spring we finished the project about social educational work within mental health and the project was presented at the world congress in Campinas in Brazil in April. The congress was a success and again I would like to thank AEESSP for the great job they did hosting so many AIEJI members and supporters and planning a very interesting program. It was a very special adventure for me again to meet so many social educators from different parts of the world. Thank you for that as well.
At the General Assembly at the world congress I was reelected as the president for AIEJI. I’m very proud of still being in this position and very proud of working together with very skilled and dedicated persons in the AIEJI board. In 2017 three of these persons unfortunately left the board. This was Irmelin Sangolt Tjelflaat (Norway) who was the General Secretary, Daniela Duff (Switzerland) who was the Treasurer and Maria Jose Calderon (Spain) who was the European Regional Officer. Thank you for your great work for AIEJI and for your inspiring company. I wish you all the best.
Luckily new and very competent people were elected to the board in 2017. At the General Assembly in Campinas Nicola Titta (Italy) and Silvia Azevedo (Portugal) European Regional Officer)) were elected. And the extra ordinary General Assembly in November Jogvan Philbrow (The Faroe Islands) was elected as the General Secretary and Guillaume Favre was elected as the treasurer. I wish you a warm welcome to the AIEJI board.
The three main tasks of AIEJI in this congress period (2017-2021) were decided at the world congress: Ethics in social educational work, social educational work with people with dementia and recruitment of new members. At the last board meeting (in November) we started up the first project by collecting formulated ethical values from AIEJI organizations to find out about different ways of working with this crucial issue. We also started up the third project – concrete by visiting the Baltic States in December to get to know more about social educational work and education in this part of the world. This resulted in a very interesting meeting and I’m happy to write (as already posted on the website) that Lithuania Association of Social Educators (LASP) very soon will be a member of AIEJI. The important project concerning dementia will start up in 2019. The three projects of course will be represented at the next world congress. This will be in Switzerland 2021.
Hopefully 2018 will be a year in the name of social education – at different levels. We need that whether we’re talking about strengthening our profession, empowering citizens or social politics. More than ever we need to stand together and show that what we do makes a very significant difference in people’s lifes and in societies. By these words I wish you again a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Best regards from
Benny Andersen, President of AIEJI.