Lublin – Münster, May 5, 2010

Dear friends,

it’s been five years since we founded our association - European Youth4Media Network. The idea that guided us in April 2005, however, is much older. For many years we’ve been working so that media education encouraged young people to be active, learn about themselves, their culture and the cultures of other nations, engage themselves in the public life and overcome the divisions that still exist in our continent.

Our association is already five years old. During those five years we’ve managed to achieve a lot. Above all, we’ve built a structure which allows us to develop further. In addition, we’ve managed to transfer our mission and common goals onto concrete actions and programs. For five years we’ve been organizing workshops on journalism and media training, seminars, debates and conferences. We educate multipliers from all over Europe. At the same time we learn a lot from them. We produce films and reports which have not only the dimension of training, but also allow us to communicate information about the thoughts and problems of the contemporary generation of youth.

The first five years are behind us. Today we finish the stage of building grounds of our association and make a step forward to take up an action in the new areas. On the one hand we are facing the construction of the European web-TV on the other hand – creating a better quality of media education.

The idea, which will accompany us in the coming years will be to support local actions of our partners. Only in this way we can reach new goals. Therefore, the organization of training courses in three areas: video journalism, online journalism, coaching skills on the one hand, and the support for local community media centers in various European countries and building up the potential of our member organizations on the other hand will be our objectives.

We are excited that our partner network is diverse and very rich. This gives us the conviction that we can cooperate even more and create joint projects. For the past two years we’ve been working on tools and procedures that will help us in this cooperation. Today we want to pass these tools on to you and encourage their use.

Therefore, we invite you to take part in the conference, which will be held on 24-25.06.2010 in Brussels. This conference will be the annual meeting of all members of our association, and a time to celebrate the 5th anniversary of our Network. Moreover, we will have an opportunity to transfer into your hands new tools with the help of which we can create joint projects.

We want to give thanks from the bottom of our hearts to all those who over the past five years engaged in the work of our association.

See you in Brussels!

Benedikt Althoff
Michał Wójcik