Gymnasium Hochrad’s very first delegation to the European Youth Parliament made it to the finals in June 2016 and won. As a treat, they got invited to the international EYP meeting in October. This is what one of the participants wrote about her experience in Laax, Switzerland (get the yearbook to read her full report ;-):
“EYP, the European Youth Parliament is an organization founded by the Schwarzkopf-Stiftung in order to inform young European citizens about the European Union and its importance for Europe. Therefore, they organize a competition starting with regional sessions all over Europe and ending in one final, international session, in which our delegation got to represent Gymnasium Hochrad and Germany.
This year’s international session was located in a small Swiss mountain village called Laax. There, students from over 40 different countries came together. The overall theme of the session was ‘Young and Innovative ideas for a sustainable future’ and under this motto we worked in committees concerning various topics such as human rights, overfishing, integration of refugees and the issue of an ageing society. All of the 15 committees produced one to three-page resolutions about a specific leading question during the three days of committee work. The days before we did teambuilding in order to get to know each other and played partly very awkward but also very fun games.
Throughout the whole session there was also a great evening program including a ‘Fackelwanderung’, several parties and a gala-event at the top of a Swiss mountain. But there was also work to do: two general assembly days were split into a nine- and a six-hour meeting, where each resolution was discuss for an hour in the same way, including speeches
All in all, the experiences I made in Laax will last a lifetime and the people I met there will definitely play a role in my future life. I’m really hoping to see them again around Europe at other EYP sessions very soon.“