Network Academy 2006 of the Democratic Youth Forum Brandenburg
I want to give you a short report about an experimental attempt we made from 12th to 20th of august. "We" that is a part of a network of groups and people from Brandenburg and Berlin counting ourselves to the "Democratic Youth Forum Brandenburg", which is just the officially name for this network. Our agenda in it is the reinforcement and empowerment of emancipative youthgroups in Brandenburg, the fortification of the single projects in our network, such as housing projects, and intervention into the public and political processes. Topics are to call some examples right wing extremism and racist institutions and society. Sure, this isn't even an attempt to summarize. Since it
exists now for about 15 years there is no one being active since the beginning. During the last years there was a big public campaing, several self-defense weekends and multiple seminars for ourselves have been organised by ourselves and a bunch of small scale projects. Furthermore there is much support to each other, many connections to other networks and groups... and there are almost always new people coming to network events.
Last year we arranged a relatively huge seminar for self-defense. The about 90 people that took part, not only learned how to assert oneself against agressive right wing extremist, but also dealt with some other practical topics, such as how to organize ourselves as young lefts for some specific goals. After this event there was lot of discussion about what could we do in future. One idea that came up several times was to intensify the transfer of knowlegde and the preoccupation with some political questions inside the network.
The result of this was the realization of the network academy. Although we met for 9 days not long ago, there was much work in advance. There was a meeting were we collected ideas for how we want to do it, what is important to think about to realize it the way we want, what will we need, what workshops might be interesting for us, what knowlegde are we able to provide to the group and much more...
The months after that, there had been much communication via an email-list, a selfmade wiki and through smaller meetings of people who organized f.e. a special workshop.
I think it is important to underline again, that the idea was to educate each other, learn and develop not in that typical way of some referents teaching some stuff to the rest. The concrete development of the single program elements in the academy has been caused by our own interests. We all concepted it together aligned it according to what we would like to know or like to deal with or want to learn or ...
To mention some things that were done there I would call a every-morning meeting dealing with left history. In this we discussed about left movements in the past, in the present, why we deal with left history and so on. Again there had been a english-course for political activists, which I found very interesting because the focus hasn't been on correct pronounciation or grammar, but more on a basic understanding and ability to engage in political discussions, plenas and things like that. Furthermore two people organized a fitness and self-defence program for the group which was fantastic and different other workshops dealt with concrete projects on which people of the network are working on these days. Additionally we watched some strange movies. Because the whole thing was new for all of us and interested also people from outside of the DJB there had been a team of so called "participating non-participants" who evaluated the process. They're going to document what they percepted.
The first appraisements of us the participants were very positive but still many of us were in the process of understanding what happenend during the academy while articulating our thoughts about the academy during the last plenum.
I for myself can say, that I learned a lot and in my perception one of the main reasons for that is that I liked the collaborative desing of the whole thing. Everyone was accepted as an expert and there was nothing impossible to deal with if some people wanted to do it. Through this there was a enormous potential of self-organized education and progress. For a first attempt this has been fantastic I think.
Other experiences, critic, ideas and related things are very much appreciated. Maybe we can talk about what should education or however I want to call it be like for us as political or social activists? Maybe we are able to develop some progressive stuff...
