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 To have the festival.forum, the Summer conference of the Youth Section, combined with the Initiative Meeting, the International Team meeting of the Youth Section world wide, taking place one week after the other this July, was a new step for us as the new YouthSection Team in Dornach. To us, this meant we were taking on two huge storms at the same time instead of only one, which is already a lot to carry. It meant a lot more work, a lot less sleep and that our entire preparation of the last nine months would come to fruition over the course of two intense, but ultimately rewarding summer weeks.
The decision to have both meetings taking place back-to-back was based on our wish to have them connected by theme and to have the attendees of the Initiative Meeting also present at the festival.forum. In the early planning process of what eventually became festival.forum, we were looking for a question that would help us focus on the individual people we were inviting to speak and contribute to our summer conference. The question, “Why do you do what you do?” began as an idea for festival.forum and then seemed to make sense for the Initiative Meeting as well. The Network of the YouthSection consists of many initiatives, which again are held up by many individuals with many different visions and motivations. These visions are what we were interested to see at our meetings, as it is these visions that inspire us amongst each other in encounters and conversations, and it is these visions that we wanted to highlight for people who were attending for the first time.
For the three days of the Initiative Meeting we came together once a day to listen to the vision and motivation of two of our Network-friends. The question “Why do you do what you do?” was the starting point from which seven speakers took us on a journey through their inspirations, to the moments when their lives changed direction, or even to the point where there were no answers. One of them said he creates spaces for others to do their work in, and none of these spaces can he eventually touch. So when he breaks it down, he does Nothing. And why he does Nothing, he couldn’t answer. But at the same time Nothing means Everything when you are creating a space. Many of us could connect to this image.
Following this Initiative Meeting was the festival.forum, a conference that combined its focus/theme in its name. Originally we had thought to name the conference “I See You,” but then realized that we wished for a festival as well as a forum, a colorful summer event that had the potential to be a deep and meaningful meeting. By choosing our contributors along those lines we tried to set the space so that we could accommodate maximum possibility. We hoped that by opening ourselves up to extremely different and contrasting impulses, the participants could really take charge and that something authentic could grow out of what was brought with them as their thoughts, interests and wishes. This was our attempted offering with the help of our contributors. From the first day onwards we as a team had to hand over the reins and give the making of the festival.forum to the contributors and participants.
We had the wish to do things in a new way, a way that none of us had tried out yet. Thinking through the challenges of “how does one keep a conference together if there is no strict program to follow?” and “how can a real and warm atmosphere develop that is not made by anyone, or made by everyone without direct leadership?”
We wanted to move away from easy conferences, from pre-decided programs, from consuming participants. We were aiming for every one at this conference to take part in the real sense of the word, taking a part and carrying it all the way through. The program was kept open, the participants were challenged to make their own choices of what they were going to do every day and the contributors had the responsibility to carry their own contribution in a situation where they did not know who would participate from one day to the next. Many challenges are posed in such an open situation where one faces the social misunderstandings that can arise.
The question we asked our contributors and speakers before hand—what we wanted them to bring to our conference—always went behind the initiatives or projects we knew them from, behind their “obvious” work, into the realm of motivation and reason why they do their work. Many young people are doing such great work and many of them have even bigger reasons to do this, and that is what we were interested in finding out. With the simple question of “Why do you do what you do?” we challenged our speakers to reveal themselves as individuals.
“I SEE YOU. I see the work, the sweat, the ideas, the tears, the laughter you are pouring into what you do... and what a tremendous thing it will be...”
-Ani Hanelius, festival.forum team
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