oikos Community

Chapter Days

In April of 2020, the community gathered for its first ever fully online formatted Chapter Days followed by another edition of the event later in the year in November. Chapter Days are two days filled with sessions designed for two main purposes: educate the community to oikos International, and foster the relationships between the local chapters that make up the international community.

Fostering relationships speaks for itself, and is aimed at creating stronger bonds between our local chapters to grow stronger together, to learn from each other as well as support and inspire one another.

Educating the community to oikos International means bringing everyone up to speed regarding what oikos International is, does and where it is headed. That means introducing the tools we create to support the chapters and presenting all of our programs. The aim of this part is to give the chapters the relevant information to better equip them for voting during the Legislative Assembly, which follows the Chapter Days shortly.

Legislative Assemblies

Legislative assemblies are bi-annual gathering of oikos Chapter to discuss and vote on important topics related to the work of oikos International. This year for the first ever Legislative Assembly was delivered completely online. It was a great success and the community interaction exceeded our expectations, showing the power of a community of like-minded people, despite difficulties. In spring, the Assembly elected Sophie Charrois as the new president of oikos International for 2020 to 2022, while in fall it elected the new Board of oikos International for 2021.

oikos International Strategy Meetings

Prior to the beginning of very semester the complete oikos International Team meets up to discuss and create the strategy for the organization in the period ahead. That means catching up with everyone and their domain, discussing what went well and what did not in the past semester, as well as what the new semester’s objectives are.

The first Strategy Meeting of the year took place in January in Switzerland, however the midterm meeting in summer, due to pandemic, was held fully online for the first time ever. It was quite a challenge to convert what usually is a long weekend, intensively packed with discussions on the same subject, into a week-long string of video conferences, designed to bring in as many inputs, decisions and takeaways as possible.

New and full chapters

In 2020 a new oikos chapter opened in Alexandria, Egypt, marking a historic milestone as the first chapter in the country.

At the Legislative Assembly in April the oikos Bangalore chapter in accession gained a full chapter status, followed by oikos oikos Hong Kong and oikos Lisbon in November.

Regional Meetings

The global pandemic and travelling restrictions made it impossible for chapter representatives to meet up in person for regional meetings, so the chapters took it upon themselves to organize them online.

The Central and Eastern Europe Regional Meeting was organized by oikos Tbilisi in September, with the main topic being bringing the change to Classrooms and in Workplace.

The Asian oikos chapters decided to team up and jointly organize the online oikos Asia Meet 2020 in November. Under the name Challenges for leaders of sustainable initiatives the event focused on entrepreneurial and educational challenges in the Asian region and in the world.

Chapter Activities

As the new circumstances of the global pandemic arose, with worldwide lockdowns and a switch to an online mode for classes, work and many other everyday activities, in 2020 our chapters found themselves facing new challenges. By then, most members had little to no experience organizing events in the online space which had become the only available format for any activities at the time.

oikos International has been in the process of going fully remote, making the Management and the Board no longer physically present in St. Gallen and moving all the work to the cloud. This meant we were prepared to make the same transition for the events and our team was working hard around the clock to provide all the support and resources needed for hosting online to the chapters.

It wasn’t long before chapters would start creating online workshops and webinars and converting their biggest events to a virtual format themselves. Some even hosted events in English and invited members of our community to attend, expanding the audience.

Some oikos chapters took the opportunity of the new virtual environment to get together with other chapters, bridging the physical distance in working together on joint project. This year was a very important stepstone in strengthening chapter bonds and creating many cross chapter projects.

oikos Graz and oikos Vienna were one of the most prolific in cross chapter collaboration this year. The two Austrian chapters have come together and organized webinars on some quite interesting and very important topics, addressing the questions of sustainable travel or taking the battles for the climate to court.

The Asian chapters worked together to host their regional meeting, but among them oikos Hong Kong and oikos Suzhou have had joint projects of their own in 2020. Due to the circumstances, oikos Hong Kong partnered with their Suzhou counterpart on their flagship Sustainability Impact Case Competition. The three week event had a large number of students participating from their homes in both cities and the Greater China region.

The St. Gallen, Bayreuth, Tübingen and Cologne chapter jointly held a series of webinars as a part of their oikos Meets Changemakers project, featuring numerous high quality speakers in German language.

Chapter project recognition

oikos Graz is one of the main contributors to the Sustainability Days project at the University of Graz which gained the recognition as a highly commended project at the International Green Gown Awards 2020.

oikos going fully remote

Our transition to functioning remotely started back in early 2019 and over time all of the oikos Team members shifted to working out of office. By the beginning of 2020 the oikos International President was the only position left working from the office in St. Gallen.

Following the handover of Presidents which was completed at the end of November, we started December as a fully remote organization.

With the remarkable state of the world and the entering of a new president, the oikos board agreed and approved to take a leap: we wish to enable the President to serve the community from a location with a more global embrace and a place with a social support network of her/his choice. While remaining a Swiss organization that is based in the canton of St. Gallen, the physical office in St. Gallen will become obsolete and is not needed any longer. At oikos, we perceive this as an opportunity to reduce structural obstacles to impartiality and nurture our team culture and health. It enables us to be very intentional about strengthening long-standing partnerships and exploring further international links and networks. We are proud of our Swiss roots and just as excited to see where we might grow from and with them.