Brussel, 26 May 2022

Growing workload demands a growing team

In 2022, ECSWE has launched more projects, provided better support for its members, and improved public relations. This increase in activities was made possible by also increasing our professional capacity, which now counts five team members and three advisors.

Managing the organisation and advocating for our interests

At our Brus­sels office, Georg Jür­gens works as man­ag­ing direc­tor and Jan­ka Szőke as office man­ag­er. Togeth­er, they over­see the admin­is­tra­tive aspects of our organ­i­sa­tion. In his role as man­ag­ing direc­tor, Georg also rep­re­sents ECSWE towards pol­i­cy-mak­ers in the EU, our part­ner organ­i­sa­tions, oth­er stake­hold­ers in edu­ca­tion, and the pub­lic. For these tasks, he is joined by Dora Šimunović, our advo­ca­cy and PR coor­di­na­tor. To strength­en our pres­ence in the pub­lic, we engage Daniel Her­ing as our pub­lic rela­tions con­sul­tant, while our ped­a­gog­i­cal advi­sor, Mar­tyn Raw­son, pro­vides ped­a­gog­i­cal sup­port to ECSWE and rep­re­sents us in the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion’s Work­ing Group Path­ways to School Success.

Directly supporting our members

At the begin­ning of 2022, Sietske van Poel­geest joined our team as com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment coor­di­na­tor. Work­ing with the man­ag­ing direc­tor and with sup­port from the board, she ded­i­cat­ed her time to organ­ise coun­cil meet­ings, coor­di­nate capac­i­ty build­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, and facil­i­tate net­work­ing among our members.

In a more spe­cif­ic con­text, Detlef Hardorp, our advi­sor for recog­ni­tion of qual­i­fi­ca­tions, con­tin­ued to pro­vide expert sup­port to our mem­bers in Aus­tria and Ger­many in coop­er­a­tion with the board. Our advo­ca­cy coor­di­na­tor and man­ag­ing direc­tor also pro­vid­ed tai­lored advo­ca­cy sup­port to mem­bers in need, and were able to coor­di­nate spe­cif­ic sup­port for our Ukrain­ian members.

Developing and running projects

Con­cep­tu­al­is­ing, writ­ing, and coor­di­nat­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of projects is a spe­cial­ty of our project coor­di­na­tor, Már­ti Domokos. Togeth­er with Dora Šimunović, she was com­mit­ted to cre­at­ing a fer­tile ground for our HERMMES part­ner­ship to flour­ish through­out 2022. She also advised our work­ing group Stein­er Wal­dorf upper schools on its ERASMUS+ project appli­ca­tion and gave cru­cial input into our appli­ca­tion for an EU Civ­il Soci­ety Coop­er­a­tion oper­at­ing grant.

Further reading