As I am writing this, I am thinking back to our online General Assembly which took place on 19 June and brought together a significant amount of ELIA members. It was great to see everyone there and to be together to approve ELIA’s Annual Accounts 2022 – that may not seem like a very exciting thing to discuss, but the accounts actually serve as an important indicator of the association’s performance in all respects. Many people are involved in getting this work to the point of the vote. I want to thank the ELIA team, members of the Representative Board and the audit committee for the time they invest in this, and to first and foremost extend a big thank you to our treasurer Marjanne Paardekooper and Finance Manager Gerard Deen. 

As you could read in the annual accounts, we had a modest positive result and I am happy that we can reinvest this into ELIA. We have a small budget to complete our internal work on our Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) policy, protocol and routines which is very important work to get done. We will be doing this during this year. Having an active working group for EDI is a part of this and I am thrilled that our EDI working group has started offering events for the community, with their second online event coming up in September, on the topic of inclusive curricula. They have exciting plans for their first platform meeting, taking place in the Spring of 2024, which will be announced very soon – so stay tuned. 

To return back to the annual accounts, when thinking forward, we freed some budgetary room to work on future strategy, already thinking about the ELIA strategy which the members will vote on at the General Assembly in November 2024. This may feel far away, yet the Executive Group and the Team have already begun these talks. You can expect to hear more about this at the ELIA Leadership Symposium in Manchester which will be the moment for you to strategise together with us. 

Additionally, several members have asked me this question, “Who gets to go to the Leadership Symposium?” and the easy answer is – we leave it up to you. There is no limitation to this – many institutions choose to send leadership teams because that makes sense to them. ELIA offers a COMBI MEMBER DEAL for teams that helps to save a bit and make this possible. After all, leadership exists at many levels in an organisation and we are happy for you to decide what it means at your school or institution. 

Enjoy our June newsletter and for those of you celebrating: Happy Midsummer!