Dialogue to Change: A Youth Vision for Fundamental Rights
We are excited to announce the launch of From Dialogue to Change: A Youth Vision for Fundamental Rights, a new publication developed as part of the FOCUS project.
August 16, 2025
Building Bridges, Shaping Futures: Highlights from the EYP Summer Academy 2025
At the beginning of August, EYP Poland welcomed 70 young participants from across Europe in Poznań for a week of intensive learning at The EYP Summer Academy, our network’s largest capacity building event, targeted to young leaders.
During Summer Academy 2025, a team of trainers led by Joshua FitzGerald (IE) created an inclusive space where past, current, and future Board Members received a full slate of trainings. Participants had the chance to explore various areas of managing the work of national organisations, from outreach through fundraising, to sustainable practises at events, to further improve the activities organised in their home countries.
The vision for the Summer Academy 2025 was rooted in its location, Poland, situated at the Eastern border of the European Union. With this in mind, the decision was made to use the symbolic feature of the hosting country to especially focus on fostering interregional collaboration and knowledge exchange between different EYP national organisations.
As one of our partners, Mr. Bartosz Kuźmiński from the Poznań Municipality, said, “In a time when some prefer walls over bridges, EYP keeps building those bridges”. Once again, we proudly served this purpose: one of the highlights of this year’s Summer Academy was the Interregional Knowledge Exchange Event – a dedicated space where representatives of different regional clusters could take part in an engaging conversation about best practices that they use in managing their EYP activities, all of this done in an atmosphere of inclusion and partnership.
A lot of emphasis was placed on sustainable knowledge retention, as well as the quality of learning materials provided to the trainees, with each of them receiving a learning journal – a notebook full of thought-provoking prompts for the reflections and learnings to be remembered and passed down to future generations of EYPers.
When asked about their personal experience of the event, the trainees shared that the interactive modules raised their competencies in many areas, as well as made them feel more connected to the rest of the EYP community. A great success of the event is how many participants returned home with broader perspectives, new skills and inspiration to keep improving the EYP network.
This edition of the Summer Academy was part of the FOCUS project, supported by the European Commission, and delivered with amazing partners including Democracy International, Are We Europe, ALDA Europe, and Verfassungsblog.
The event also benefitted from the diversity of its participants, with one participant joining through the Youth Together for Arctic Futures project – an EU-funded initiative led by the WWF Global Arctic Programme, together with the Saami Council, Arctic Mayors’ Forum, Tromsø Kommune, the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, and the Arctic Youth Network.
The next step is for the trainees to bring their newly acquired knowledge back to their own National Committees, shaping a network that is diverse, open to innovation and full of opportunity for everyone.
