Dev Diary #1: The Vision
Hello Everyone!
Today, we will kick off a series of bi-weekly dev diaries for our new initiative, Atlantic Forum and the envisioned Young Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network (Y-TLN). We intend to keep feeding you with more information every two weeks until the launch of the Y-TLN, currently planned for 4/4/20. Occasionally, depending if there are exciting developments when things move faster than we expected, or more slower then we had hoped, we may throw in weekly entries.
4th of April 2020 seems far away now, but it will likely be there faster then we would want it to be. Anyway, in the first entry, I thought I’d simply give you some background on the project and the vision I have for Atlantic Forum.
So, how come we decided to start a grassroot initiative on our own out of all things? Well, the idea has been kicking around between a group of young professionals for a while -when each of us were involved with other young leadership programs and networks – for most of it we overlap in the various networks and programs we joined over the past few years. It is our ambition to do more with this informal network than that were currently doing and it has a lot of support internally among the team and the first patrons we welcomed this week (seeking freedom from the shackles of their existing programs, which limit strategic autonomy).
At the end of 2018 we ended up having a few meetings with various NATO institutions, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and NGO’s in Brussels to get a better idea of what they wanted us to do. When in January 2019 I went around in Washington D.C. visiting existing networks (German Marshall Fund’s Young Transatlantic Network; Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, Atlantic Council), I toyed around with joining forces and merging our network into theirs. It seemed at that time to be the most logical next step.
Eventually it was a round table discussion with Jake Sullivan hosted by GMF that in retrospect ended up the spark for starting the Atlantic Forum. Jake was talking about the transatlantic relationship, and how Americans having dealt with the hurricane season had this rebound spirit. Pulling themselves up by their bootstraps they would survey the debris and decided to rebuild. But rebuild back better.
The things they liked the would rebuild the way it was, the things they didn’t like they would build back better. The mission for Atlantic Forum in short is: “to draw together the young leaders of today and tomorrow and we see it as our mission to bridge the gap between the policy level and civil society”. That sounds pretty vague eh? Yet, I think it captures the spirit of what we are trying to do. I want to make Atlantic Forum and the Young Transatlantic Leadership Network (Y-TLN) the network connected all existing network – a network of networks of sorts (which, granted, is a pretty tall order!).
Atlantic forum diverges from all other networks in certain key respects:
- It does not have an overarching patron decided for us what to do;
- It is grassroot and focussed on volunteerism;
- It focusses on the current generation of young leaders (rather then calling them future leaders!;
I have always disliked the term future leaders – young professionals of our generation (say age 25-35) are the ones making the decisions on the workfloor today, and will grow into the strategic level later. But it is the decisions on the workfloor that count. We understand the importance of elite influencing, and are not begrudged to existing initiatives focussing on diplomats and generals, but we believe the difference can and should be made lower down the tree.
This matches again our desire to be grass rooted in nature, bottom up rather then top down. We put a lot of effort into making this part of the initiative feel fresh and unique compared to existing programs. We also understand that this means that in the early phase (we envision this to last the first half of the year) we have limited things to offer in return of your patronage except for our goodwill, blood, sweat, tears and grid. It will take some time before you make a return on your investment in the Atlantic Forum – which in turn makes us extremely grateful for the support we have received so far!
Check back on April 22nd to learn more about our patronage!