We will surely remember the year of 2020 as the one of COVID-19 pandemic, which changed our lives. These unusual times of our existence brought us at the same time – among others – some of the best youth exchanges in the history of the Youth Forum of Odorhei, which by the way celebrated in 2020 its 30 years of activity for the benefit of young generation living in Odorhei area… Happy birthday UFF and keep up the good work!
Unfortunately, we were unable to organize those projects when we were supposed to do so… The pandemic situation in Europe and the travel restrictions of authorities made all together a very difficult (let us say, impossible) task the organizing process of international youth mobility events. In this situation – having the support of our great partners from all over Europe – we decided to postpone all the youth exchanges of the Youth Forum.
Our philosophy regarding youth exchanges is very close to the traditional approach: if possible, we would like to avoid transforming activities for the online world… We think that the very essence of a youth mobility is the personal interaction and the close contact of the participants from several cultural backgrounds, which are of the utmost importance when you develop your project’s main purposes. As we see it, it is very hard (almost impossible) to transform youth exchanges to online platforms and reach the goals and objectives you were planning to achieve when you handed in the application in the first place…
We are strongly committed to organize the below described two exchanges as we planned to do so. However, the whole concept of the two youth mobility would have to suffer if we would consider changing (entirely or part of it) the programs for the online platforms… Therefore, we postponed them for a period of time, when our lives will be more predictable. At least we hope for that to come one day… This is not the situation we were expecting for, we are not happy at all, but the first concern in this matter has to be the health of our participants and alternatively the success of the exchanges!
We think that we can all agree that we are living some unusual times right now. To be able to predict the unpredictable and to organize our lives as NGO’s we have to be as flexible as we can and to hope for the best to come. You can read a description of our two extraordinary interesting youth exchanges in the coming sections.
