Blog post by Jonathan Elebjörk, EDF Youth Committee member.
The European Youth Event (EYE) 2023 took place in Strassbourg, France, in the beginning of June and I had the opportunity to take part as a member of the EDF Youth committee together with other members of the committee and participants from the Ascend Citi Project.
EYE is an event which purpose is to create a meeting space for young people all over europe. During the event we got to attend a lot of seminars and workshops that were arranged during the event. Amongst others, I attended one called “EU on the global stage: A voice that counts”that was an interesting seminar that was about how the EU’s work at the global stage works with a focus on the situation in Ukraine during the last year. During the EYE, EDF arranged two own seminars. One about the situation for persons working in Europe, as well as one about knowing your rights in the EU.
On the same time, attending events like these often reminds me how far we still have to go not only to create hearing accessibility, but also towards more accessible events. When an event like the EYE makes necessary adjustments to how the physical environment to access an area that is adjusted to fit an event as big as the EYE the adjustments might, for such an easy reason that you chooses to not use a microphone in a room be removed. Or to put up cables to a temporary construction, creating new barriers.
This shows us that if arranging an event with adjustments requires knowledge how to ensure you do not remove those out of lack of knowledge, doing so with adjustments made to the physical environment requires even more of that knowledge.
But on the same time, it is through the fact that we are there, that we decide to go there, accessible or not, that it’s possible for us to put the spotlight on how accessible large meeting places such as the EYE are. How important it is that the mainstream arenas for dialogue, might it be in the youth sector or somewhere else, are accessible for all. For that. We need to be in the room, not outside it. And if we can’t, we need to request to be there.
It’s not only participation for the sake of participation. It’s participation to ensure that nothing about us without us includes every part of who we as people with disabilities are.
Photo credit: Jonathan Elebjörk