Fall Meeting 2020 – another productive meeting for the EPF Youth Group
By: Anastasia Sofia Semaan
During the second weekend of October, the EPF Youth Group held its Fall Meeting. Despite the virtual setting, it was still fun and enjoyable. More than anything this meeting gave us the opportunity to socialize as a group, and to talk through some of the challenges that that we have been facing over the past year. Most importantly, it gave us the chance to set up our goals for the next few months.
A valuable lesson that I believe we all learned from this meeting is that “honesty really is the best policy.” The more open that we all were with each other about our feelings towards our projects, our groups and our struggles, the more clarity we were able to upload and the more trust we were able to develop with one another.
One of the main goals of the meeting was to choose which projects we want to focus on over the next few months. We have decided to focus on developing our Sexual Health and Education Project and a Survey on Youth Groups in Patient Organizations. During our meeting, we also spent some time discussing potential ways of presenting the projects that we will be working on. We acknowledged that implementing structure and planning within our smaller groups is very important and therefore is one of our main goals to conquer over the new few months.
One of the major announcements was that many of our members will be “ageing out” and how this will affect the current Youth Group. At the end of October, after the 4th Edition of STYPA will have come to an end, we will be recruiting new members to apply to join the Youth Group, hopefully from a wider range of patient groups and various condition backgrounds. Once these new members join our BIG family, we hope to continue working on our project portfolio together.
Overall, this meeting has been a great eye-opener and learning experience for how we can work more proactively as a team. It is through honesty, communication, listening and self-expression that change can happen, and we hope that this will come through in our upcoming plans that we are excited to begin.