The History of IFM-SEI

The History of IFM-SEI 1922 -2017

The Beginning in 1922 In the first decades of the 1900s, more and more organisations were founded who worked for the ‘socialist education’ of children.

In groups, children from working-class families could self-organise, critically reflect society and experience solidarity.

In 1922, representatives of socialist educational organisations from Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Czechoslovakia met in Austria to discuss the role of socialist education.

They founded the ‘International Committee of Socialist Educational Organisations’ with German, Austrian and Czech founding organisations.

The First Members of IFM Founding members Kinderfreunde (Austria) SJD-Die Falken (Germany) Kinderfreunde (Czechoslovakia)

1927 DUI-Leg og Virke (Denmark) Latijas Bernu Draugu Biedria (Latvia) 1928 Hungarian Childfriends 1930 Schweizer Kinderfreunde 1934 MEO (France) SKIF (Poland) Faucons Rouges (Belgium)

First ‘Children’s Republic’ 1927 Seekamp, Germany This camp with 2300 children was not just a holiday camp where children could play games, eat well and return home with some additional pounds; no, the camp was also a great educational experiment.

1933: First SEI Camp ‘Falcon Republic’ Oostduinkerke, Belgium 700 children from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France,

Holland, Poland and Switzerland enjoyed the camp.

Camp anecdote: Near the end of the camp the Austrian delegation, who already had great problems with the fascist dictatorship in Austria, asked the Flemish Rode Valken to keep their flags safe for them until they would be free again to use them in Austria. These flags remained hidden in Belgium during the war and were handed back over afterwards.

More Falcon Camps: 1935 – 1937 - 1939

2nd Falcon Republic, Verneuil L'Etang (France), 1935 900 children, from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, UK and Switzerland.

Theme: ‘Trotz Alledem’ (‘Despite all’)

3rd Falcon Republic, Brighton (UK), 1937 2000 children, from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France UK, Spain, Switzerland and Tunisia.

Theme: ‘Solidarity’

4th Falcon Republic, Wandre (Belgium), 1939 1600 children, from Belgium, France, UK, Switzerland, Tunesia and refugee children from Spain.

Theme ‘Liberty and Peace’

More Organisations Joined 1935: Framfylkingen, Norway 1935: Woodcraft Folk, UK 1936: Red Falcons of America 1938: Rode Valken, Belgium 1938: Spanish Pioneer Federation 1947: Unga Örnars Riksförbund, Sweden

First International Camp after WWII In 1946, in the immediate aftermath of global war, the Woodcraft Folk hosted an international camp in Brighton.

It brought together children and young people from previously warring countries, to create, for a fortnight, a community of hope for a better future and a better world. The event was instrumental in helping restore the shattered international links between children's and youth organisations dedicated to peace and social justice.

The International Falcon Secretariat The SEI practically ceased to exist in the 1930s because of the suppression of the socialist children's movement in Hitler Germany and other countries before and during WWII. In 1947 the organisations decided that the time was not yet ripe for a strong international movement, but they founded the ‘International Falcon Secretariat’ with its headquarters in Amsterdam.

Aims: to work for the better knowledge and understanding between the different national affiliates.

Post-War Conferences, Congresses and Camps between 1947 - 1953 Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed (Israel) joined IFM in 1959.

Rashtra Seva Dal (India) joined IFM-SEI in 1962.

Several conferences, congresses, large camps and leader training courses were held. During those year the IFM gained a reputation and was recognised as a partner by for example UNESCO. However, it took some years until all national Falcon movements decided that it was time to set up a real organisation again.

At the Congress in Nuremberg in 1953 the International Falcon Movement was founded.

IFM in the 60s In 1962, the 8th IFM Congress in Vienna took some important decisions: • Full recognition of the challenges of developing countries; main task of the IFM defined as: spreading the ideas of socialist education in the developing world • Decision to cooperate with IUSY and other Internationals of the Labour and Social democrat movement • Headquarters of IFM moved back to Vienna • Adoption of IFM educational principles In the 60s, IFM became more and more international by including organisations from newly decolonised countries.

A New Old Name New areas of work resulted in the development of new statutes and a new/old name that was adopted at a conference in Germany in 1970: International Falcon Movement Socialist Educational International or IFM-SEI. The name change and several changes in the statutes expressed a willingness to cooperate with like-minded organisations which didn't necessarily have the same background as the traditional Falken groups.

Malta Labour Party Brigade joined IFM-SEI

IFM-SEI in the 70s Study visits to other continents, Congresses, leaders seminars, action plans in the framework of the International Year of the Child and different camps were organised in the 70s.

In that time, IFM-SEI strengthened their relations with the European Youth Forum, the Socialist International and the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe, organised joints activities with International Union of Socialist Youth and had several cooperation meetings and joint activities with the Scouts and Guides movements and CIMEA (communist youth).

IFM-SEI in the 80s The main topic in the 80s was Children’s Rights. The UN Convention was still under discussion and IFM-SEI played an important role in the advocacy work towards the adoption of this Convention.

Other topics were child labour, child abuse, peace and the situation of children in war and conflict areas.

We also paid special attention to the work and cooperation in the Middle East.

Expansion of International Relations CAIC (Children's and adolescents' International Cooperation) 1981 IYNF (International Young Naturefriends), CIMEA (International Committee of Children's and Adolescents' Movements), WOSM (Scouts), WAGGGS (Girl Guides) and IFM-SEI formed an International Cooperation called CAIC. CAIC organised common youth activities between Western and Eastern Europe in the spirit of peace, friendship, cooperation, children’s rights, understanding and mutual respect

Camps, Campaigns, Awards In the 80s, IFM-SEI ran a big anti war toy campaign with many European member organisations.

We also developed a successful toolkit to discuss child poverty with children’s groups.

Peace Messenger Award 1987 In recognition of a significant contribution to the programme and objectives of the International Year of Peace, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Secretary-General designated IFM-SEI with the honorary title of ‘Peace Messenger’.

IFM-SEI Peace Activities in the Middle East In 1985, the IFM-SEI Secretary General handed over a letter to the UN, written with blood

by Palestinians. The IFM-SEI decides to encourage peace activities among member organisations in the Middle East.

In the 90s and 2000s, almost yearly peace camps and seminars were held in the Middle East and in Europe in the framework of IFM-SEI’s Peace Project Association and the Middle East Youth for Peace Movement.

More and More Organisations Join…

Les Francas, Franca (1970)

Leo Lagrange, France (1979)

APCC, Portugal (1980)

Esplac, Catalunya (1986) IFM camp 1988 in Imatra (Finland)

Expansion in Latin America Thanks to the voluntary work of Alejandro Moraga in the IFM-SEI office in Brussels, IFM-SEI could improve relations with Latin American members. This resulted in Latin American Commission meetings and camps.

Latin American Commission Meeting, Uruguay 1989

Latin American Commission Meeting, Chile 1990

IFM-SEI in the 90s Reforestration Camp (India), 1991 A big camp organised by Antar Bharati which took direct action for a better environment by planting trees.

International Camp Norrköping (Sweden) 1991 This camp, hosted by Unga Örnar, brought for the first time large groups of Palestinian and Israeli children together. In total more then 5000 children participated in this camp!

These organisations joined us in the 1990s

1998 1994 1992

1994

IFM Camp: Youth cultures World cultures, Zánka (Hungary) 1997

Children and young people from all over the world met at Lake Balaton in Hungary.

Women Power in IFM-SEI 1995-2001 For the first time two women are leading IFM-SEI: Odette Lambert (Faucons Rouges) as Secretary General and Jessi Sörensen (DUI Leg og Virke) as President.

Reproductive Health Education From 2001 on, IFM-SEI was very active in the area of Reproductive Health Education.

In Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe a series of seminars took place to tackle this taboo subject and to train peer educators to work on this topic.

More Activities and Actions Child Labour Seminar 1997 Hosted by Antar Bharati, IFM-SEI organised an International Seminar on Child Labour in the Era of Globalisation IFM-SEI Pedagogical Briefcase 2000 The IFM-SEI Pedagogical Briefcase ‘Fighting against Child Sexual Abuse’ was realised with the support of the European Youth Foundation.

Children's World Conference, Wiesen (Austria) 2000

Seminars to Strengthen Eastern Europe In the 90s, a series of seminars was organised to strengthen the Eastern European region, in France, Hungary, Romania and Russia. They focused on different topics (campaigning, strengthening participation, etc) and were instrumental in establishing a network of organisations in Eastern Europe, many of which have now collapsed unfortunately.

Camps in Other Regions In 2004, an international camp was held in Huancayo, Peru.

Global Village 2006

In 2006, an IFM-SEI camp was held in UK, hosted by Woodcraft Folk, 60 years after the organisation invited its sister organisations to the first camp after World War II. Global Village brought together 4500 children and young people from all over the world for two exciting weeks.

More members joined IFM-SEI in 2010 Fenix, Slovakia

YOBEC, Liberia

OGCEYOD, Cameroon Liepajas Jaunie Vanagi, Latvia

800 young people, 12 days, two campsites, one Train for Change Train for Change’, organised by Kinderfreunde Austria, Czech Pionyr and IFM-SEI brought together more than 800 children and young people from all over the world. The children themselves decided that the camp should be about ‘Action for Social Change’ with the themes Gender and Sexuality, Discrimination and Prejudices, the World Economic System, Climate Change and Children’s Rights.

Middle East Youth For Peace

The Middle East Youth for Peace cooperation continues until today. The Palestinian and Israeli members work closely together in the regional ‘leading group’, which has a very big impact on the cooperation between our Israeli and Palestinian member organisations.

Educational work in IFM 20072014 In the last years, IFM-SEI increased its number of projects and activities especially on global level on a number of topics, notably poverty, equality and inclusion, sustainable development, cooperation and the MDGs.

Inclusion Strategy ‘All Together’ This strategy, aimed to make member organisations and IFM-SEI more inclusive, led to many new initiatives and projects and is still ongoing in ‘All Together 2.0’.

EVS – Volunteering Worldwide Since 2008, IFM-SEI regularly hosts EVS volunteers and in 2011-2015 also coordinated volunteering programmes between member organisations.

The volunteers support their host organisations in their regular activities such as running children’s groups and organising campaigns.

Peers without Frontiers In this project in 2010 we set up a global network of peer educators working together on the Millennium Development Goals. The participants shared approaches to peer education and supported each other in developing local projects. These projects have been implemented in 16 communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe and reached more than 2000 young people in the communities, 800 participants of IFM’s global festival and several thousand users of the educational materials.

All Together Against Climate Change With the project ‘All Together Against Climate Change’ (ATACC) in 2011 we created a European network of peer educators who received professional training on media and communication and climate change to transmit to their local youth groups and wider communities. They work with their peers to develop creative media campaigns on the fight against climate change which address young people in their environment and in the form and language best suited to them.

Rainbow Resources The main aim of ‘Rainbow Resources’ is to empower and support young people to facilitate human rights education with children though development of LGBTQ educational resources, tackling hetero-normativity and increasing understanding of gender and sexuality amongst children.

The “Rainbow Resources”, published in 2011, have become very popular in our organisations and beyond. In 2014, IFM-SEI publishes a new edition of this useful resource.

Volunteering against Poverty The aim of ‘Volunteering against Poverty’ (2012) was to develop a strong network of young volunteers from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America to raise awareness on youth poverty and the struggle for decent work by producing educational tools and a thought-provoking and inspiring documentary. 24 young volunteers from all over the world have been trained in peer education and documentary-making to facilitate local video projects.

The 43-minute documentary film ‘If you are poor, I am poor’ shows perspectives on poverty from around the world. The group 24 volunteers from 4 world regions have given people living in poverty a voice to express their opinions on changes that need to happen in society.

CooperAction The Co-operAction project in 2013 aimed to promote the cooperative model of enterprise to young people through education, exchange and practical experience of setting up co-operative enterprises in 11 local communities.

Local groups learned about co-operative values and principles, developed ethical business ideas, decided on rules, roles and responsibilities in their co-operatives and are now running their small businesses.

All Together 2.0 In 2014 IFM-SEI revised and re-launched his “ All together” inclusion strategy. A group of ten volunteers took the lead in strengthening social inclusion in IFM-SEI on all levels through a variety of activities and developed a set of clear objectives and action lines to make the movement more inclusive to young people with fewer opportunities.

In a second phase IFM-SEI focused on combatting exclusion on the ground of gender and sexual identity. A new publication on rainbow resources with more feedback, new work done, more and better activities, updated info and more tips for facilitators was published in different languages.

Partnerships for Participation Partnerships for Participation was a project aiming to increase the quality and quantity of young people’s participation in the democratic life of ten communities in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America through building genuine and sustainable partnerships between young people, youth organisations, schools and local authorities.

Children in ten organisations set up partnerships with local councils or schools to have their say in decisionmaking. The develop new approaches to child participation and train decision-makers in using them.

Study sessions in the EYCs • In cooperation with the Council of Europe, IFM-SEI held different successful study sessions at the European Youth Centres in Strasbourg and Budapest.

• Topics in 2014-2017 include: Tackling the Culture of Violence (tackling corporal punishment), Children on the Move (inclusion of child refugees) and All In (incusion of young people with disabilities).

Peace Education Year • Violence and war are all around and affect everyone. Children and young people are victims of armed conflicts.

• Peace is the absence of wars, terrorism, torture and violence. But it is much more than that.

• IFM-SEI organised in 2015 two seminars, one focussed on Mediation, how can young educators become mediators for youth organisations or schools? The other one dealt with political conflicts and wars-what causes these conflicts? Who gains? How are children and young people affected?

• Peace education activities were developed and a strong network of peace educators was created.

• Online campaign “ Stories of Conflict”collects experiences of children and young people with conflicts and conflict transformation.

• Publication of a Peace Education Handbook.

External Recognition In the last 15 years, IFM-SEI was stronger and stronger represented in other youth bodies.

• 2002: A delegation of children took part in the World Summit on Sustainable Development • Steering group for the EU Forum on the Rights of the Child • European Children’s Rights Action Group (CRAG) • Represented in the board of the European Youth Forum (YFJ) and the Latin American and Caribbean Youth Forum (FLACJ) • ICMYO Task Force (International Coordination Meeting of Youth Organisations) • Steering groups organising the World Youth Conferences in 2010 and 2014 • Ad-hoc expert groups of the Council of Europe and Advisory Council on Youth

Campaigns For Gender Equality • After a successful facebook campaign to promote gender equality a short manual with educational activities on gender equality .

Visa working group • The visa working group keeps campaigning against unfair and complicated visa regimes particularly in Europe.

• We want to support young people in overcoming these obstacles.

P4P – Partnerships for Participation This project ran throughout 2015 and aimed to strengthen our work on empowering young people to participate in external decision-making. The volunteers helped to promote the active participation of children in decision-making and show that with safe and meaningful participation structures in place, teenagers can work effectively with decision-makers to have their strong opinions heard. Results : a Child Participation Handbook to raise awareness of the importance of child participation and to support educators to empower children and young people to participate in decision-making.

Peace Education Handbook The handbook has been developed in the framework of IFM-SEI’s Peace Education Year 2015, supported by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. Are you interested to read more about how young people experience conflicts in their societies and how they try to transform them? Then have a look at our blog “Stories of Conflict and Peace” . If you would like to contribute a story, contact us by e-mail

Can be downloaded in PDF version on our website Other language versions available : German , French , Spanish , Hebrew , Arabic

The Group Matters • •

•

The Group Matters is IFM-SEI's latest campaign to support our existing children and youth groups and people who would like to start running groups.

Group work was a priority area in IFM-SEI’s strategy and work plan 2013-2016; we want to promote and strengthen children and youth groups as most sustainable places for human rights education and education for democratic citizenship.

Groups are the core cells of our non-formal education approach, where children grow up in solidarity with each other, learn how to participate and cooperate, gradually take more responsibility and analyse society together.

IFM-SEI Camp 2016: Welcome to Another World IFM-SEI’s event of the year happened from 23rd July - 5th August 2016!

Hosted by our German member organisation SJD - Die Falken, it took place at the Willy Brandt Zeltlagerplatz in Reinwarzhofen.

The camp brought together 2500 children, young people and leaders from 30 of our member organisations across the globe to live as an international socialist community for 2 weeks and take part in a fun, engaging central programme.

On the Move: flight, migration, visas and regional youth work • First global project with equal participation from all participating regions: 4 organisations each from Africa, Europe and Latin America • Three expert meetings on: migration and refugees, visas, and regional youth work • A new visa platform focusing on three areas: support, education and campaigning • Two regions meetings: Africa (Ghana) and Latin America (Peru) • Two e-learning courses created with content from the expert meetings: migration and refugees, and regional youth work and funding • Final educational resource for groups and organisations

The only way that we can prevent sexual violence in our IFM-SEI community is by each of us taking responsibility and choosing to act. The ‘I act’ campaign is based on the active bystander model of violence prevention. It aims to educate IFM-SEI members to identify situations that could lead to sexual violence and then be an active bystander by intervening to prevent it. Each individual action might not seem like it will make a difference but if we all choose to act, it can create a much bigger change. Each green thumb print represents one person who has said ‘I act’. Will you?

November 25th is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and we are going to have some actions together to raise awareness as a global movement.

And our socialist education continues…