CELA NETWORK

Capturing the momentum of the leadership workshops

CELA really gets started where other training sessions in Central Eurasia stop. CELA makes a long-term commitment to continue to support and encourage participants in their career trajectories. Summer workshops are merely a beginning, not an end. Academy graduates are inducted into an extensive, vibrant network offering a cascade of follow-up activities. The network exists to support friends and their initiatives and stimulate cooperative enterprises; to share information and ideas openly; to transcend geographical and professional sectoral boundaries; to spur regional communication and reduce stereotypes; and to underpin international trust and people-to-people diplomacy among the tomorrow’s leaders, decision-makers and opinion-formers. By facilitating cooperation, comprehension and mutual respect across borders, CELA helps to underpin security and confidence-building in Central Eurasia. In a region where there are far more obstacles than in the past to the circulation of people and the free exchange of ideas – and where Western thinking tends to monopolize reform models – CELA serves as a regional stock-exchange of lessons learned and best practices that can be shared among neighbors. CELA maintains its shared spirit by means of reunions, regional roundtables, joint projects and other networking events to encourage initiative and collaboration among CELA members on a regional basis. The dedicated CELA website has a sophisticated members’ section provides a centralized “virtual” meeting space and information clearing-house for the whole network. The CELA Study Tours permit members to link up with their friends in the region for face-to-face meetings and investigate areas of mutual interest. CELA has created a robust leadership network in Central Eurasia that, from a purely geographical perspective, is more ambitious than anything similar ever attempted. Linking forward-looking people across the region and internationally, the CELA network widens horizons, helps to pry open the region’s societies, and lays the groundwork for tolerance and mutual understanding.