DEEEP Development Education Summer School – June 2012 -
CHANGE LAB 2012: What Happened?
Information provided by Chiara Tripepi, DEEEP3 Communication Officer

After 14 years, the development education summer school closes its doors. It is not a farewell, rather a goodbye!

A last successful summer school, gathered for 7 days some 100 participants, from 40 different countries, in Zvanovice, Czech Republic. The success is not only due to the participants, who made the discussions and the exchange actually possible, but also to the great organization managed by FoRS with the support of DEEEP, and all the people who got involved in this summer school (volunteers, rapporteurs, facilitators, experts, photograph, newsletter team…)

From June 24 to June 30, the participants exchanged on how to engage local societies in sustainable development.

This year the summer school organisers decided to introduce a series of new elements: for instance, a key note speech was made on the first day by Susan George who provided ground for reflection for the week. Participants have also had the opportunity to meet with Czech local NGOs, discovering for instance People in Need, Glopolis or the Mama Café. Aside from the more traditional working groups asset, an open space session allowed the participants to think out of the box, and sit together and discuss on specific issues. Two graphic harvesters translated in drawings the main discussions of the week, and presented the final drawing during the closing session.

A Kenyan youth football club challenged the participants in a football for development game. The young players are part of the MYSA project (www.mysakenya.org) , which aims at empowering young people through sport (see article published in the September DE Times).

Participants left the summer school with some food for thoughts, new friends, new potential partners to develop joint projects and reflections around sustainable development. Though they all live in different parts of the world, far from each other, the online platform prepared for them, as well as the facebook group created shall ease the communication and exchange between them.

DEEEP3 has now come to an end. It may have been the last summer school under this format, but the future holds new projects, new trainings and further peer learning. It is not the end, just the beginning of a new era that will be supported by DEEEP4 which is likely to start beginning of 2013, keep an eye on the website !

Reports of the working groups, final evaluation and further documents are available at www.deeep.org .