On 7 March 2026, during the SAME Annual Congress in Ratzeburg, Germany, SAME held a dedicated Strategic Planning Workshop with representatives of Member and Candidate Organisations. Facilitated as a participatory and youth-led reflection process, the workshop created space for organisations across the network to jointly reflect on SAME’s current realities, discuss key strategic dilemmas, and contribute to the future direction of the network for the period 2026–2031.
The workshop was designed as a structured process moving from analysis to strategic direction. Through reflection exercises, SWOT analysis, a World Café on key tensions within the network, commitment-based exercises, and discussion of a draft strategic framework, participants explored questions of ownership, governance, sustainability, growth, autonomy, and cooperation. The methodology was intentionally built to encourage trust, openness, and shared ownership, making sure that strategic thinking remained with SAME’s governance bodies and member organisations rather than being imposed from outside.
A key strength of the workshop was that it helped translate broad concerns into clearer strategic directions. Participants reflected on tensions such as participation versus co-ownership, centralised stability versus distributed responsibility, SHL support versus SAME autonomy, growth versus consolidation, and network spirit versus formal organisation. These discussions helped surface what kind of network SAME wants to become, and what conditions are needed to build a stronger, more sustainable, and more widely owned future.
The main outputs of the workshop were a shared reflection on SAME’s current position, collective input on key strategic tensions, and structured feedback on the proposed strategic framework for 2026–2031. The main outcomes were stronger ownership of the strategy process among member organisations, clearer alignment on future priorities, and a stronger basis for developing a strategy that is both realistic and rooted in the lived experience of the network. Participant feedback confirmed the high usefulness of the workshop and the value of creating a space where organisations could think together before deciding together.
