Dev Diary #48: What's ahead of us
Hello everyone!
The first week of May is a special week where we remember how fragile peace is and celebrate our freedom. It is marked with commemorations related to the second world war, with liberation day in the Netherlands on the 5th of May and Victory in Europe Day celebrated in Canada, the US and Britain on the 8th. Short back in history we also celebrate the restoration of independence of Latvia (4th of May) and Estonia (8th of May). Something that our oldest patrons lived to see, but perhaps not experience it its full extent. While those days are linke to evil doers such as the Nazi and Soviet regimes, today it’s COVID-19 that brought the world to its knees again. There’s one thing this invisible enemy can’t take from us: the power of remembrance.
As we take heart in this importance message, the Atlantic Forum team is also happy that we are looking towards the (post COVID) future and are starting up our project planning again. We have three major projects lined up, that we aim to make recurrent events for Atlantic Forum as our Flagship projects. Our confernce team has started with the planning of our first Annual Conference.
While we celebrated transatlanticism on our launch date 4th of April 2019, and took stock again on the 4th of October with our friends at the German Marshall Fund Brussels Office six months later, we eventually would want both days to grow out to our own conferences. Orignally scheduled for the 4th of April 2020, we aim to bring together 100 young transatlantcists to Brussels in October, and are closely following Brussels phased planning in reducing the COVID measures. Secondly our project team for the week long seminar in Brunssum is on standby. The seminar has changed from winter to spring to summer seminar, and will now likely return to its original format as winter seminar for late 2020. We envision this to be a recurrent event, also on a 6 month rotation, with a summer seminar taking place in july 2021. Finally a fifth recurrent event is being planned in the baltics, more information on that will follow soon!