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"Anatomy of a Work-Campleader", Seminar report, 1986

by Heinz Gabathuler (Aug 27, 2017)

One more report from a seminar on workcamp organisation and leadership from the deep 1980s. The seminar took place in a nice place outside Helsinki and it was called The Finland Seminar. Finland was not just a country among others in Europe, it was also an in-between space back then, in between the East and the West in the Cold War.

 

 

Consequently, after the seminar, the participants made a short bus trip to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), USSR (now Russian Federation) in order not just to taste some caviar but also to strengthen the links between SCI and its Soviet partner organisation KMO (Committee of Youth Organisations). And the seminar had been organised by the CCYMSC – the SCI Working Group responsible for exchange with partners in socialist countries (later renamed to 'GATE'). Seven out of 32 participants represented these partners – two each from Yugoslavia (Slovenia), Hungary and Poland, and one from Czechoslovakia. Present was also Chandru from the International Secretariat that had just moved to Bangalore, India.

Maybe it is this intercultural / interideological character of the seminar that is responsible for the much more serious and less ironic character of the report brochure, compared to the one from the seminar in Scotland just one year before. The reader is being taught on different types of leadership (autocratic, laissez-faire, democratic), on what aims to pursue during the camp (to activate the campers, to let the campers grow and open, to let the campers feel their own power, to vanish into the background).

Roleplays are presented on different potential conflict situations in workcamps, such as if a volunteer does not want to use the same dishes as an HIV positive person, or on drug abuse by a workcamp participant. Like its predecessors, also this report contains a distinguished selection of weird cartoons, probably cut out from the huge cartoon books we had in the 1980s, when layout was still a matter of scissors, paper, and glue. The page numbers are all handwritten, and I wonder whether this was an aesthetic choice – or the mere consequence of technical constraints.

One session was devoted to study parts in workcamps, and Cold War was present in a panel discussion the participants joined in the Peace Station in Helsinki (which later became the office of the Finnish SCI branch, KVT) about causes of enemy images between countries and how they can be overcome. This sounds familiar, in a way...

Heinz Gabathuler, International Archives Coordinator

Reference:

In the International Archives, the report is being stored in the same file as the previous one: 40712.2 (Seminars: Reports, Correspondence. 1983 - 1995)




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