SYL’s Development Cooperation Advisory Board (KENKKU) is a voluntary group of students representing different student unions from Finland. In this blog we will shed some light on how KENKKU works and give our own views on what can be learned by participating and why you should join KENKKU. The advisory board has two teams, the project management team and the communication and fundraising team, which work closely together and help each other whenever needed.
The project management team is responsible for example for monitoring the progress of the project, applying for project funding and for communication with local partners. The communication and fundraising team on the hand prepares social media material for project communication, plans blog posts, participates in events on the field such as the World Village Festival and does fundraising in cooperation with student unions.
SYL has coordinated different development cooperation projects for decades. The current project supports disabled students in three different public universities in Ethiopia in cooperation with a local partner ECDD. Students are supported by conducting trainings, increasing awareness of issues relating to disability, providing aids for studying, and by encouraging universities to take responsibility for ensuring that disabled students are provided with quality education.
LYY is represented in KENKKU at the moment by the writers of this blog post, Iikka and Mariam. Mariam is in the project management team and has so far gotten to review and comment on the mid term report which monitors the progress of the project. She will also get to prepare a new project funding application with the team. Iikka, who is responsible for fundraising, has met with representatives of different student unions with other members of KENKKU. In the meetings they have presented KENKKU’s work and made plans on different kinds of communication and fundraising cooperation, like the writing of this blog post.
We both applied for KENKKU because we found development cooperation important to us and because we wanted to offer our help to achieve a more equal world. Mariam wanted to gain experience on project management, whereas Iikka wanted to do fundraising at a larger scale than in his previous student association work.
So far, our experience in KENKKU has been extremely interesting and rewarding, and we want to encourage everyone interested in the subject to follow our work for example on Instagram and of course to apply for KENKKU next year!
Iikka Sorvali
Member of the Development Cooperation Advisory Board
Student Union of the University of Lapland
Mariam Dardikh
Member of the Development Cooperation Advisory Board
Student Union of the University of Lapland
