After receiving a letter from “Youth UnEmployment” project about the opportunity to support the EAD-idea at the local level and to organize the EAD-conference in our city, we agreed without any hesitation. The main problem was to choose the topic of our conference, because all of the offered themes seemed to be very interesting and important. But the two of them attracted our attention and aroused our interest: voluntary work and entrepreneurship. After a long controversy about the theme of the conference we decided to take them both. That’s why our conference assumed a special character and a program, which consisted of two different parts.
The main idea we wanted to report to our future visitors was: “How voluntary work and entrepreneurship can help exactly you and what skills and experience you can have, being engaged in this fields”. But we also decided to have speakers from freedom of speech working group and the opportunity to choose the main theme of their reports.
The first part of our conference, held on 22-23 January, was devoted to voluntary work. As for a voluntary organization, for AEGEE this topic is very near and also very important. As special guests we had the President and Vice-President of the voluntary fund “The Kind Planet”, that helps children from children’s homes. They told us, how to get skills and experience to be successful in future work and also to help children, who needed our kindness and help. Another topic from this theme was “Voluntary work in sports”. 2014 Russia has Olympic Games in Sochi and there is a great amount of volunteers needed help there. The report was very interesting for those, who want to participate in this international event.
The second part of the conference was devoted to entrepreneurship and we’ve seen all the riches of our young specialists’ imagination there. We’ve invited students and post-graduates, who had already their own business. They told visitors about advantages and disadvantages of such kind of activity and discussed different problems, which need to be solved in this field. The projects were various: from internet-cites to cooking and producing honey. Also here we have discussed such an important topic as motivation for self-improvement, because it is one of the main reasons of success in entrepreneur business.
After the conference all of the presents were very inspired, but it was really difficult to decide where visitors wanted to be engaged in now: in voluntary work or in entrepreneurship. But in spite of the difficulty of choice, no doubt, that this event gave students the information they needed to choose their future way in life.
