UNYANET Alumni

2010 to2018 · and still here

The network stopped. The people didn't.

What this is

UNYANET was a network of United Nations youth associations. The first meting was in Oslo in 2010, the formal foundation took place at the UN in Vienna in 2011. UNYANET Alumni followed in 2013, for those of us who had finished our studies but wanted to stay connected. Neither is active today. There have been no general assemblies since 2018.

This page stays up anyway, and it has two jobs.

One: an address. Somewhere former members can find each other again. When a group of us met in Copenhagen in 2025, without an agenda, it turned out that the interest in doing that every year or two is still very much there.

Two: an archive. What we did between 2010 and 2018 exists mostly in private folders, photo albums and individual memories, scattered across a dozen countries and some data is even lost forever because nobody was able to save it. Alone, each of the remaining pieces will slowly disappears. Together, they are a record of something worth keeping. So if you have anything, photos or documents from Vienna, Ljubljana, Berlin or anywhere else, presentations, minutes, posters, a story about how a project came about or fell apart, send it. There is no format and no deadline.

Nothing goes online without asking. Material is collected first and kept privately; anything published here appears with your name if you want it to, without if you prefer, and only once the people involved have agreed. If a photo shows others, we ask them too.

Write to info@unyanetalumni.org

Where we come from

After the first meeting during a winter storm in Oslo in 2010, on 5 August 2011, youth representatives from the UN youth associations of Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Romania and Switzerland, together with the UNA youth sections of Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey, met at the United Nations Office at Vienna and founded UNYANET. Organisations from Bangladesh, Italy and Uganda joined later. At its peak the network counted ten member associations and three observers, with 57 local branches and roughly 14,000 individual members between them.

The point was never the structure. It was that a students from different countries, backgrounds and level of experience could work on the same project, that knowledge did not have to be reinvented in every country, and that people who cared about the same things could find each other across borders. There were seminars, media workshops, general assemblies — Ljubljana in 2013, Berlin in 2016 — and a great deal of correspondence in between.

UNYANET Alumni was founded in August 2013, right after the third general assembly in Ljubljana, as a Swiss association seated in Geneva. The idea was that those who had aged out of the network could keep supporting it: as an alumni body, as a bridge to the United Nations, as a pool of expertise for the member associations. It did not work out the way we hoped. UNYANET wound down; the alumni association followed.

UNYANET Alumni is a non-political not-for-profit association seated in Geneva, Switzerland, and it consists of former active representatives and members of UNYANET that have finished their studies and are now working in their fields of expertise.

From the association's own description, 2013

The record

Everything that is documented, most recent first. The entries from 2014 to 2017 are what was published on this website at the time; the rest is what has been added since.

Read the full entries · Add something

Get in touch

If you were part of UNYANET or UNYANET Alumni and want to be there next time we meet, getting access to the archive etc., just write to info@unyanetalumni.org. There is no membership to renew and no form to fill in — an email is enough.