25.05.2012

Equal opportunities for young people in the UEM

The United Evangelical Mission will be blazing new trails in coming years by putting new emphasis on work by South-North and South-South volunteers. “We have already been able to create four new South-North posts that were filled in March 2012. There will be eight to ten per year beginning in 2013, and we will be setting up another half-time consultant position in order to do justice to the growing tasks and demands”, says Anika May, head of the UEM’s interregional and volunteer youth programme. The exchange between African and Asian member churches, which began in 2008 and as such is the newest of the three UEM volunteer programmes, is also due for expansion. By doing this the UEM will be opening up equal opportunities to young people from all three regions where UEM member churches are located, as well as building up both the quantity and quality of the programme and declaring its identity as an equal, equitable communion of churches on three continents.

“I have campaigned hard to support this expansion and new emphasis in our programme goals, but it was also the right time to do it. Many organisations are just now discovering the possibilities and learning opportunities that come about through this type of exchange, for all participants. It’s looking like there will also be new funding opportunities for this programme in the near future. I think we have grasped that we here in the North could also benefit from strengthening South-North exchange. A comparably modest funding effort in this area can yield much fruit.”

The UEM has traditionally fostered North-South exchange. Over the course of the last three decades, many volunteers from the German member churches have spent a year in Africa or Asia. Since the UEM began receiving financial support as part of the Weltwärts (world-wards) programme of the German Federal Government, the number of volunteer posts abroad has been increased to 15 per year. Just as the UEM did back in the early 1980s, when the first German young people were sent abroad as "missionary-diaconic aid workers", the mission is now blazing a new trail in the area of South-North exchange. By the mid-1980s, long before so-called reverse programmes became a general objective in missions and secular sending organisations, the UEM was already acquiring experience inviting young people from African and Asian member churches into German congregations. But it was a long road from occasional initiatives to an institutionalised South-North volunteer programme.
 
The reason for this was rooted in many practical specifics, as well as a changing understanding of mission. For example, it is not so easy to incite enthusiasm in German congregations about hosting a foreign visitor for a year and integrating this visitor into work. Since life in the German context is much more individualised and therefore also more anonymous than in the visitors’ countries of origin, experience shows that many volunteers at first have a difficult time settling in and need intensive educational companionship, which in turn requires a large staff commitment. Unfortunately it has not yet been possible to apply for subsidies, so financial provisions for this programme fall far short of those for the established North-South programme. This is why, in contrast to the well over 300 Germans who have been involved in the Global South in the past, there have thus far been only some 15 young women and men who have made the trip in the opposite direction.