Reunions

If the summer leadership workshops are the heart of the CELA program, radiating from that core are collaborative projects and activities designed to engage CELA fellows as they are inducted into the larger network. Reunions reinvigorate the network as platforms for face-to-face meetings that serve as an opportunity for CELA members to catch up, exchange insights and share newly gained experience. Key events are the general grand reunions, bringing together all CELA members to date, and themed smaller reunions and meetings that keep them connected and open to new trends in the region.

The initial series of reunions were staged in Istanbul, Turkey (April 2003), Mtskheta, Georgia (May 2004), Almaty, Kazakhstan (October 2004), and Bakuriani, Georgia (2006). CELA members also got together when the program was showcased in 2005 in Astana, Kazakhstan within the framework of the conference of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).

Bakuriani inaugurated a new phase of CELA’s institutionalization and indigenization, with programmatic responsibility and ownership increasingly in the hands of the CELA members, on whom it falls to organize and craft reunion agendas themselves. As the next generation of leaders best positioned to appreciate the needs of their region, they take the lead in determining how CELA and its resources can best address those needs – implementing their own meeting and project ideas, addressing themes from cross-border and cross-sectoral perspectives, exchanging learning opportunities and comparable lessons from different parts of the region.

On the initiative of CELA fellows, themed reunions (seminar or study-tour format) have been held in Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan (2006, 2007), Yerevan, Armenia (2007), Baku, Azerbaijan (2007), Bukhara, Uzbekistan (2007), Almaty, Kazakhstan (2008).