The EYP has been in partnership with the E.ON Foundation since 2012 and together we have co-created multiple climate-related projects, impacting thousands of young people across Europe. Our latest project, Alumni United creates a space where our alumni can stay connected and support the next generation of EYPers, while also contributing to a just transition and empowering positive change that extends beyond the EYP.
In August 2026, during our 105th International Session in Niš and Novi Sad, Anabel Rother Godoy, Project Manager from the E.ON Foundation working closely with the EYP, addressed our young participants ahead of the General Assembly, reflecting on the meaning of compromise, the importance of community, and the role young people can play in shaping Europe’s future.
Read her address in full:
“Three years ago I travelled to Warsaw for a workshop. I had just joined the E.ON Foundation, and this was the very first meeting of a new programme we were supporting, called Rebuild Ukraine Ambassadors. I knew the project on paper. What I did not know well yet was the European Youth Parliament. I had never been an EYPer. I did not have the vocabulary, I did not know the rituals, and I arrived in the role of the person from the funding organisation, which, let us be honest, is not the most glamorous role in a room full of people who came to argue about the future.
But Nobody in that room treated me as an outsider. Not for a minute.
Three years later I am still here, and every time I arrive at an EYP event something happens that I did not expect when I signed my contract. I see faces I recognise. People greet me before I have said anything. I have watched participants become alumni, and alumni become colleagues. So let me say this plainly, because it matters to me. I have become part of something I never applied to. That says something quite precise about this organisation. You have built a community that does not check credentials at the door.
I am half German and half Spanish. I grew up bilingual, in two languages and two cultures at the same time, and for a long time I assumed that this was simply normal. It took me years to see what it had actually taught me. Understanding another person is work. It does not happen automatically. Two people can use the same word and mean genuinely different things by it.
In English, and in German, a compromise is a settlement. Something is given up. In German the word Kompromiss can even carry a faint smell of defeat. But In Spanish, the word compromiso means almost the opposite. It means commitment. It is the obligation you take on, the thing you are now bound to. So same Latin root. Completely different emotional temperature.
I will think about that word later today, when your plenary begins. A resolution that survives a General Assembly is both things at once. It is a compromise, because nobody in the room got everything they wanted. And it is a compromiso, because a group of people have now committed themselves to a position they can all defend in public. That is not a weak outcome. That is the entire skill.
The E.ON Foundation is an independent foundation. We work on the societal side of transformation, on how communities and individual people get through the shift to a climate neutral energy system. Climate and energy is our legacy topic inside the European Youth Parliament, and it is the reason our two organisations found each other in the first place.
But why does that subject belong in a room like this one, and not only in an engineering faculty?
Energy has never been a purely technical question. Energy is about dependency. It is about who supplies whom, who can be put under pressure, and who is free to take their own decisions. Energy is infrastructure, and infrastructure is security. Since February 2022, nobody on this continent needs that explained to them. So when we talk about the energy transition, we are talking about European sovereignty and about the terms on which this continent will live for the next twenty years. It is not a niche environmental subject. It is one of the central political questions of our lifetime.
Two of our programmes follow directly from that, and some of you are already in them.
The first is called Alumni United. Because what struck us about the EYP is that it does not really end. People leave, and they stay. Somewhere out there are thousands of former participants who now work in ministries, in energy companies, in NGOs, in journalism. They debated a climate resolution at seventeen, and then took jobs where those decisions are actually made. Alumni United connects that generation with yours, through mentoring, through professional hubs, and through gatherings and discussion events across Europe.
The reason we invest in this is simple. Ideas need carriers, and carriers need time. The resolution you pass will not change European policy on Monday. What it will change is you. Ten or fifteen years from now, some of you will be in a room where a real decision is taken, and you will still remember what you argued for at nineteen. Our job is to make sure that you can still find each other by then.
The second programme is Rebuild Ukraine Ambassadors. A group of young Europeans between seventeen and twenty six, more than half of them Ukrainian, come together and combine their visions for a future of Ukraine into a publication. In June this year six of them presented that publication in Brussels, to the European Commission, to Members of the European Parliament, and to people who decide about reconstruction funding. Not with appeals. But with recommendations. The most recent call attracted almost a hundred applications, and in October the next generation meets in Berlin. Nobody gave those people a seat at the table because of their age. They earned it by having ideas and knowing how to get them across. The EYP is where such skills are built.
There is one thing that needs to be said: Europe is not a given.
I know how that sounds at an event where everybody is friendly and the whole week rests on the assumption that this project is worth the effort. Reaching agreements between twenty seven governments is slow. It is often ugly. Speaking with one voice, on energy, on migration, on defence, is genuinely difficult, and every time it works it took somebody months of patient effort.
But here is the thing I would ask you to hold on to. That difficulty is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. The alternative to a slow agreement between equals is a fast decision taken by whoever happens to be strongest. Europe chose the slow version deliberately, after learning what the fast version costs. You will feel the weight of that choice today, when a resolution you care about meets a room that does not automatically agree with you.
The theme of this session is fusion, and I want to offer you a slightly different reading of the word.
My two halves never actually fused into one smooth thing. I am still German in some rooms and Spanish in others, and the interesting part of my life has taken place in the friction between them, not in some peaceful average of the two. Europe, at its best, works the same way. It is not a project to make us similar. It is a structure that allows us to stay different and act together anyway.
And finally, an invitation. When this session ends, most of you will go home and something will slowly fade. That is normal. But this organisation has the unusual quality I began with. It does not let go of people, and it does not check credentials at the door. So when your time as a delegate is over, stay. Join the alumni network. Come to a reunion. Take on a mentee, five years from now. Alumni United exists so that this week is not the high point of your involvement in the EYP, but the beginning of it.
I can speak from experience here. I never applied, and you took me in anyway.
Thank you for having me, thank you to the team of EYP Serbia who made this session possible, and enjoy your General Assembly. I am looking forward to learning about the resolutions you compromise on today.”
