GEN Europe Staff & Council Meeting – Reflections and the road ahead

The GEN Europe team, staff, and council met during the last week of November at Sunny Hill in Slovenia for our bi-annual staff & council meeting! We gathered to reflect and strategize on GEN Europe as an organisation and welcomed new people into our circle and strengthened bond to keep collaborating effectively together.

We onboarded three new council members elected at the last General Assembly: Neus Valls, Ronja Tammenpää, and Anne Bretschneider. We also welcomed two new staff members: Bernarda DeOliveira, last year’s ESC for the Gathering, who has stepped in during Natasa’s maternity leave (Natasa gave birth in early October to a sweet baby, named Duša, meaning “Soul”), and Anna Ksiazek, who has joined our project team.

Autumn meetings are traditionally a time for reflection: How do our ways of working reflect our values? What are we truly here to serve? How well are we aligned with our guiding star? As it has been four years since our last strategic reflection, we felt it was the right moment to revisit these questions and begin drafting a new strategic plan. To support this process, we invited Nara Petrović to facilitate our work on this process. Through storytelling and collective reflection, we identified the core qualities that draw us to the GEN Europe network:

Deep Belonging and Service to Regeneration

➡️How does this resonate with you? We warmly invite you to share your reflections and continue the conversation on the GEN Europe Forum.

In a collective dream of GEN Europe’s future, the following qualities were omnipresent:-

• Strong relationships and solidarity within the network
• Cooperation with other NGOs and governments to actively shape the future of Europe
• Diversity in gender, colour, age, culture, religion, and class
• Advocacy as a core part of our work

We then worked in smaller groups exploring different areas, including ongoing projects, the future of the Gathering, our IT platform, and more. One clear insight emerged: the need to engage our members more deeply in these discussions.

At the end of the day, GEN Europe exists to represent its members and to give visibility to ecovillages and the wealth of knowledge cultivated in communities over the past 30 years. Many of you who attended the General Assembly this summer will remember that becoming more politically active was identified as a strong emerging direction.

Would you like to be part of this?
We invite you to join the Advocacy Working Group and help shape our advocacy baseline and procedures. Your input and experience are essential.

The final day of our meeting coincided with the first day of the National Networks Meeting. We shared our insights with delegates from National Networks and explored how our reflections resonated with their realities. Stories and outcomes from that meeting you can read in the designated National Network meeting report.