Volonteurope: Our European Life cluster held its fourth meeting
Volonteurope is already engaged in the politics around the Future of Europe since before the official launch of the Conference on the Future of Europe that has been kicked off in May. So far, two plenary sessions have already been organized in Strasbourg with regard to the Conference on the Future of Europe. Furthermore, randomly selected citizens from across Europe have been gathered together for the Citizen Panels under the official Conference process. The Official Multilingual Digital Platform went online in May 2021 and citizens or CSOs across Europe are invited to take part in the process.
More than 80 European NGOs, platforms and networks formed an alliance named Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe. With regard to civic space participation, in the plenary sessions, there are 8 seats dedicated to civil society, apart from social partners’ seats, and five of them are allocated to the Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe. Piotr Sadowski, our Secretary-General, has been elected as a member of the steering committee of the Convention, and Volonteurope co-leads Our European Life cluster together with CEV – Center for European Volunteering.
Since June 2021, we have been focusing on identity, migration, security, Europe in the world, sport, freedom of movement and civic space with the members of our cluster. In order to get inputs from across Europe related to the subtopics mentioned above, we did invite our cluster members to take part in the consultation process. On the 25th of November, we held our fourth meeting to discuss final inputs from them and are now ready to work on the inputs of members. Co-chairs, Piotr Sadowski and Gabriella Civico who is director of CEV, and secretariat staff, Furkan Sorkuncuk from Volonteurope and Kristijan Gjorgjieski from CEV, are going to work on the inputs and come up with a final product with the recommendations about the subtopics. I personally take this chance to thank Queralt Perarnau, whom I worked with while she was doing a traineeship at CEV, for her huge help to the cluster as a secretariat staff.
Furkan Sorkuncuk, Volonteurope Youth Worker
