The new Board of Directors BD of the FIMEM has only four members, which isn’t sufficient according to the statues and the work to be done.

Our General Assembly has three parts: first the information session, second the discussions in the language groups and third the decision taking session. With all the translations it’s always a difficult task to get through with all the topics.

This year in Ljungskile we had big problems in the third part, not being able to finish in time. We had to continue after dinner and even on the next day. Already the language discussions took three or four evenings, at least in the German group.

One of the reasons were missing papers as a base for the discussions. “You can get them on the FIMEM site”, we were told. But we couldn’t get hold of them, because they were in the internal space and none of us in the German group had a key to get into this internal space.

Another problem were the propositions coming from the different language groups. Before we could discuss and vote on them, we had to make a synthesis of all the propositions. We should have done that prior to the third decision taking part of the General Assembly.

Our new Board of Directors (BD) has only four members: Mariel Ducharme from Canada, Sylviane Amiet from Switzerland, Antoinette Mengue from Cameroun and Lanfranco Genito from Italy.

The statutes say there should be at least five. During the last 10 years it had been very difficult to find new candidates to the BD. The tasks have become bigger and it’s more difficult for a person, who is still working, to enter the BD. As a fact some elected candidates had to drop out again only after a short period.

This could be the reason, why we have only four members on the BD at the moment. How can they manage, when the amount of work is so big? How can our federation function in such a way? I am quite worried about the actual situation!

We absolutely need new candidates for the BD, at the latest in two years when we travel to the next RIDEF in Quebec! Maybe even sooner. Not yet elected candidates could already work together with the BD and help achieving all the tasks. 

I ask the bigger movements like Germany, France and Spain to make sure they will have a valuable candidate in Quebec. But also smaller movements like Mexico, Belgium, Sweden, Bulgaria or Austria should seriously look for people to help our federation going forward in the next years.

We have to be aware, that it is our responsibility to keep the FIMEM running and working. We owe this to our new members like Uruguay and Greece and all the others which joined our movement during the last years!

Andi Honegger, Switzerland