Hello all,

I was happy to read this letter from Mariel, president of the Fimem Board. I invite you to read it on the fimem website.
I am looking forward to the next ridef because I feel that there will be great opportunities to make our international movement stronger and to reinforce the national movements.
During Ridefs and in between Ridefs, we can benefit more from the human resources (yes, that is us!). We Ridefians are an interesting diverse variety of enthousiast freinetworkers with complementary skills, living in a century that gives us new possibilities in terms of communication and international cooperation.
Let’s make more use of our time together: in previous ridefs grew some new ideas that ask for further thinking and developping. In 2016 we reflected about a different approach to the idea of “basic groups”, there were cool multicountry-initiatives, in 2014 we invented a problem solving group, ...
I see people with different motivations:
- some people want to support / improve the actual Ridef
- some people want to think about / organise the future Ridefs
- some people want to reinforce their (and other’s) national movement
- some people want to help spread the ideas of Freinetpedagogy
- some people want to reinforce FIMEM and its communication

I think it is a good idea to organise during ridef and during pre-ridef moments of worktime/thinktime: open for all people who want to do to donate some time and energy to Fimem.

For instance:
- preparation time for intercultural evenings (performances with people from different countries – e.g. powerful messages in Dogbo)
- think together with the future ridef organisers (Quebec and Morocco) and the organisers of previous ridefs to exchange ideas and build the Fimem heritage, a Ridef toolkit with good practise, to preserve expertise and pass it on to future generations.
- learn how to make a blog/website for your national freinetmovement
- write or translate books/articles, make movies
- work for the fimem website / learn how to use it
- think together with the board of Fimem (for some topics, it is efficient that the board is a small group, but for other topics it is a pity to have only the small board and the big assembly. I think Fimem could benefit from some sort of group in between these two forms)
I believe that there are more people who want to work together on questions like:
- How to communicate in between ridefs?
- How can Fimem be more efficient?
- How can we preserve equal participation from all continents?
- How can we make a Ridef Toolkit for organisers?
- How can modern technology help us reach our goals?
- How can we have more people interested to be in the Fimem Board?
- How can we organise the international solidarity?
- How can we solve language problems?
- ...
We don’t have to solve everything immediately during the next ridef, but I am confident that we could advance and take some steps in each of these topics when we decide to invest some time in this...
Are you also joining in ? What are your ideas?

Optimistic greetings,
Katrien