With over 40 national organisations and a 35-year long history of organising International Sessions, the EYP Alumni Network reaches far and wide! By our rough estimate, there are over 200,000 EYP Alumni in the world. Among those are 92 IS presidents, a good 140 IS Editors, as well as over 140 IS Head Organisers, and more than 100 Governing Body members. Every time we organise an event, we make this pool just a little bit bigger. You can find Alumni in all corners of the world, from Brussels to Hong Kong to Sydney!
When you have just started your EYP journey, it is hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of people came before you. A delegate that joined the digital International Session Milano 2021 might find it strange to imagine that delegates in the 1990s were invited and informed of the session logistics by means of a physical letter. A president who shares a hostel room with their Board might find to odd to hear that host families were a more common form of accommodation when EYP started.
If you voted in the last Governing Body elections, you might find nothing more logical than a democratic system to govern our youth NGO, but the first Governing Body was installed only in 2005 – 18 years after the first EYP session! And those starting to join Media Teams in the 2020s may consider podcasts a “typical” media project, but the first Media Teams – then “Press Teams” – actually wrote (somewhat) daily newspapers. With sometimes one camera, a borrowed computer, a printer, no InDesign, and a long night ahead of the Press Team, they would manually craft and copy newspaper copies for the delegates to read in the morning!
Although it is tempting to think that EYPers all become politicians, that is definitely not the only destination for an EYPer. When we are at sessions, we already notice the great diversity among our fellow participants – this translates into their future paths as well! From doctors to lawyers, from professors to industrial photographers, from UN officials to journalists in Washington, from business consultants to aerospace engineers, our Alumni have a myriad of different professional backgrounds. This diversity is what makes our network so strong!
Having experienced what it is like to write a resolution together with an internationally oriented committee of delegates, many EYPers go on to run for their national or the European Parliament, join the European Commission, work for their national foreign ministries, travel the world from embassy to embassy, or represent their nation (or Europe!) in another way.
A gentle reminder that you can still connect with other EYPers, even if you do not have the time or space in your life to go to sessions anymore. You can connect with other Alumni in all sorts of ways, for instance by organising a Happy Hour, signing up for a Reunion, or by joining the Alumni Facebook group! Once an EYPer, always an EYPer!
