The RAN YOUNG Empowerment Academy (RYEA) held its fourth session on 10 and 11 September in Berlin: this session focused on professionalisation of the participants as individuals, in their teams and of their initiatives. Several sessions were dedicated to defining what professional behaviour is, reflection on participants’ own professional attitudes and the professional development of their initiatives.
A number of key lessons are:
- If other people, your colleagues and partners, consider you as professional, this will result in their willingness to cooperate with you. This is key as you will always need to cooperate with other organisations, colleagues, funders and communities.
- A professional attitude entails reliability, punctuality, communication skills, responsibility, flexibility, continuous focus on your goals, discipline and self-discipline.
- Teams that work effectively together deliver better work.
- You can’t control the situation, however you can control your own behaviour.
- What is your unique selling point? Have a clear main activity that makes your initiative stand out; try it out, learn from it, and improve it over and over again. When this is your proven effective unique selling point, you can start thinking about expanding.
This paper is written for young activists who have decided to take action and seek solutions to the issues and challenges in their communities by setting up their own local initiative in the prevention of radicalisation and violent extremism. This is the fourth practical paper published by the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) in 2019. The aim is to support this target group. Each paper corresponds to each stage of initiative development. Read more