Last year we celebrated 30 years of YEE. Members and old friends share their wishes:

Gosia (Poland)

Dear YEE, Happy 30th Birthday! I wish YEE a great next 30 years, green years. I hope in 20 or 30 years maybe my children will celebrate at a YEE Annual Meeting. Good luck with everything and see you somewhere in Europe.

Adriana, Anne and Monika (Slovakia, Germany, Poland)

We met in YEE and we would like to wish you another amazing 30 years with YEE! Happy Birthday!

Sara (Sweden)

Happy Birthday YEE! I used to be on the Board from 2006 - 2008 and it was a wonderful time. I will be working in Suriname for 2 years and as one experience leads to another, I can say that this experience that I'm doing now is thanks to YEE in many, many ways. For the last 5 years I've been a Youth Advisor in the United Nations Environmental Programme, and that was an amazing experience as well thanks to YEE so I have so much happiness that I was involved... I am so happy for all of you who can still be involved in YEE so please make the most of it.

Kyrylo (Ukraine)

Once upon a time I read a quotation saying that the best person to compare yourself to is you yourself in the past. Looking back in 2009 when I started volunteering in YEE, I am realizing how many positive changes have happened in me. First and foremost I am referring to the significant development of my personality which I always aspire for. YEE gave me a great opportunity to develop my leadership, linguistic, communication skills as well as considerably increased my knowledge in manifold fields ranging from environment to media and advocacy.

My first encounter with YEE took place in August 2009 during the Annual Meeting in a picturesque village Villamanin located in the mountainous region of Spain. I distinctly remember my first feelings of confusion with the amount of information and the contents of discussed topics which I sometimes could not understand deeply due to the lack of the linguistic skills. Fortunately there was a bunch of very friendly people – representatives of YEE MOs, the Executive Board and the Secretariat – who were kindly helping me along the meeting. Many of them remain to be my good friends nowadays.

Moving forward in time, to the Annual Meeting 2013, by which I had already been for 4 years on the Board, I have to underline two things if I compare my feelings with AM 2009: on the one hand I had got an understanding that YEE is a way more complex entity than I thought of it in 2009, but on the other hand during the past 4 years I had managed to apprehend this complexity to a certain extent and even become its integral part, which I am very happy and proud of.
Cutting the long story short, I would like to thank YEE for all the experience and knowledge that it gave me, for a lot of funny moments that we had and most importantly for amazing people whom I met during the YEE activities.

I wish my Organization further prosperity, many successes and outstanding achievements, financial stability and many enthusiastic and committed people who have always been and remain to be an invaluable asset and engine of volunteering activity!

Yours faithfully,

Kyrylo

OPE Ecoclubes (Portugal)

The Ecoclubes (www.ecoclubes.pt.vu) network arrived to Portugal about 10 years ago and since then we've been growing each year and consolidating our action among the local communities where we are located.

On top of this local impact, we've also strengthened our national cooperation and became a cohesive movement of very active young people, willing to show to others our beliefs and way of "fighting" for a better world.

There is nothing better than these six year old photos of one of our main national initiatives to represent the Ecoclubes spirit in Portugal!

As you can see in the big message of one of these rafts, "Protect the Environment, Protect Yourself", it could fit very well also to YEE's spirit of action and so with this we send our Happy Birthday for this 30th anniversary!!!

It has been a great pleasure and opportunity for us to take part on this broad european netwok and we would like to think that our contribution to it has also been usefull for other members. That's why we wish to continue actively participating on YEE's network, working to achieve a better world!