On 15 October we held a special event for alumni of the Programme. We were thrilled to welcome back Ana Vasconcelos Martins, a Portuguese MEP in the Renew Europe Group. Ana was one of our first Scholars, completing the Programme in 2019. Her group project had focussed on reaching out to people who felt disconnected from the EU to understand better why and to think about how to encourage them to engage and get their voices heard.
Our conversation with her focussed on her decision to stand as an MEP and how different being an MEP is from what she was expecting, as someone who had studied the EU and the parliament in the past. Ana discussed her committee work and also showed that her desire to encourage as many EU residents and citizens as possible to engage with EU political processes regardless of their political stance, remained strong. She answered all questions forthrightly and emphasized the need to offer something meaningful to voters.
Following Ana’s talk, we launched our mini-grants scheme for Scholar alumni. These grants will help support further policy work and are designed to deepen connections across different cohorts of Scholars. We were joined by scholars from other cohorts and gave them plenty of time to network.
We finished the Alumni afternoon with the premiere of a documentary, ‘The Community Urban Garden Effect’, which was created by our current scholars working on how to increase the number of community urban gardens across Europe as a means of tackling climate change and promoting social cohesion.
Although the afternoon of 15 October was devoted to Scholar alumni, we were pleased to welcome alumni of different Europeaum programmes throughout the conference. Several graduates of the Europaeum MA in European History and civilisation joined us for parts of the conference, as did several Scholar alumni – a testament to how our alumni are choosing to engage with the world of policy and the EU institutions. This is perhaps exemplified by another of our alumni – António Leitão Amaro, the Minister of the Presidency in Portugal, who were thrilled to have deliver a keynote at our conference earlier on Wednesday. He spoke about the importance of the values the Scholars Programme promotes – working across political and social differences, thinking outside the box, and leading with moral courage.
