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ECVC Youth Articulation Training: Poland 2025

Topic: Rebooting the Food System (EU Project)

When: 4-8 December 2025

Where: Ecological Folk High School, Grzybów 1/2, 09-533, Slubice, Poland

Why:

  1. Strengthen ECVC youth articulation and politicise young farmers
  2. “Train the next trainers” through popular education and peasant to peasant methodology.
  3. Build alliances and exchange knowledge with climate and social justice youth activists on agri-related topics
  4. To foster greater cooperation between youth in Landwork at the European Level.
  5. To give participants an opportunity to share learning and strategy that they use at a national level to meet goals and challenges

List of Plenaries

  • Moving Forward together: Building international solidarity with existing national struggles; exploring ways in which we can struggle collectively for common ends both within existing framework of the EU and outside of it.
  • Housing, Land, Migrant workers and Solidarity: Exploring the intersection between the international housing crisis and the crisis of land access as a barrier to entry for young farmers; exploring the importance of building community as a form of security when living in insecure/precarious living situations to give us power and agency within an exploitative system.

List of Workshops

  • Intro. To ECVC Youth Action Plan: Establishing the context of the youth articulation, its history, its remit and its goals.
  • Collectivising the struggle: Roots, Shoots and Thorns: In small groups completing a common exercise exploring our political contexts (roots), the positive ways in which we have built our organisations to respond to them (shoots) and the difficulties we have faced both internally and externally (thorns).
  • Introduction to ECVC Working groups: The goal of this session was to give space to introduce the different wings of ECVC and to activate more youth participation within the general ECVC structures.
  • Presentation on Food sovereignty in Palestine: Raising consciousness on the intersection between food sovereignty and the question of national sovereignty and colonialism.
 

Overview and Key Takeawys

Talamh Óg members Dan and Steph participated in the recent meeting of the ECVC youth articulation in Poland. Over the course of 4 days we participated in numerous workshops, discussions and trainings which helped to reinforce the common platform for the collective struggle of young farmers and situated and those aspiring to work the land.

The ECVC youth articulation was established to enhance the participation of youth within the established policy processes and working groups of the ECVC in order to include the voices of young peasants in these spaces. Initially a fringe group, in the last 3 years the group has received more attention and staff support which has enabled greater relationship building and has resulted in more volunteer participation. With an increasing number of ECVC member organisations establishing local youth articulations, the voice of the young peasant is getting stronger and stronger.

Throughout the weekend there were many moments of peasant to peasant sharing where we both got to learn from more established youth groups some strategies for growing and strengthening our own while also sharing and celebrating the strength of Talamh Beo in an international context. There was an explicit effort to expand the range of voices within the room, particularly from the Eastern European/Post-socialist context; Within the rooms there were representatives from Poland, Hungary as well as a representative from a group in Georgia representing the situation outside of the EU jurisdiction. This broader perspective enabled an expansion of the peasant horizon beyond the often restrictive and oppressive bounds of the European Union.

While we shared a lot of organisational knowledge and raised collective consciousness on common antagonists, perhaps the biggest benefit of the weekend was the fostering of interpersonal connections and sharing moments of care. Many of us left the weekend feeling physically tired but spiritually and emotionally energised. In this sense we fulfilled one of the core goals of La Via Campesina in that we globalised the struggle, and we globalised the hope.

Viva La Via Campesina, and power to the youth who struggle for land justice and food sovereignty globally.

Domhandaigh an Streachailt, Domandaigh and Dóchas!

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