ESN Lund

In the city of Lund in southern Sweden we can find this month's Section in the Spotlight - ESN Lund! Lund has one of Sweden’s leading and oldest universities founded in 1666 today with 42,000 students.
ESN Lund consists of a board with five people, where all board members are of different nationalities (Swedish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Turkish and Finnish). There is as well an Activity Committee consisting of 35 members which are in total of 20 different nationalities. The Activity Committee is internally divided into seven Working Groups: Culture, Sports, IT, Parties, SocialErasmus (divided internally in Education-Environment-Charity), Partners, and PR & Communication.
The section was born in the beginning of 2000, though it worked informally and first in 2011 it registered as an official organization in Sweden. This gave way to a recognized status within the main Student Union of Lund that made it possible for the section get its first office this year located in the Castle of the Student Union. During the last year the section has expanded a lot, it has gone from being only around 10 members to today’s 35 members. It is as well daily requested for cooperation with other student organizations and partners.

ESN Lund has always been very involved in the network. Former NR’s of Sweden and Denmark have been originally from ESN Lund. The section also has people in the National Board (last NR and the newly chosen president) and moreover, our newly elected International Board President, Emanuel Alfranseder, belongs to this section. Worth mentioning is that ESN Lund has members in different committees such as ICE, ComCom and IT as well.
To inform and communicate with the international students ESN Lund uses their Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/ESNLund) with almost 3 000 members, as the main platform for discussion and announcements in English. The students themselves use the group intensively and it would not be far from the truth to say that it is one of the most active student Facebook groups in Lund.
In the fall of 2011 ESN Lund was the first section in Sweden to start using the ESNCards, now selling around 1 200 card per year. Other sections followed instantly and in spring 2012 already half of the country uses the cards. Besides being the first Swedish section using the ESNCards, ESN Lund organized the first Responsible Party in Sweden last January. This again inspired other sections around Sweden and more Responsible Parties’ are to be expected during the spring and in a near future!
Lund is a very hard environment to be a successful student organization, due to the large amount of other student organizations already existing in the city. However, ESN Lund has managed very well with its goal of expanding and becoming the main organization for all international students in the area. The section organizes trips to Lapland (northern Sweden), Russia, Stockholm, the Sea Battle (Estonia), Prague, Gothenburg, and occasionally trips to Gotland. Moreover the international students have the possibility to join traditional Swedish dinner parties, international balls, monthly theme parties, salsa courses, football tournaments, bowling, small trips to Copenhagen and Malmö, visits to local museums, Erasmus in Schools, cottage weekends and much more during their time in Lund.
Previous years there has been an exchange between ESN Lund and ESN Copenhagen where students from the two sections visited each other for one day during a weekend. This year, ESN Lund has planned a new event with chance of getting to experience the Danish capital. In cooperation with ESN Denmark and ESN Malmö (and other interested sections), ESN Lund is planning a full day’s program in Copenhagen during the 9th of May (Europe Day), this due to the big Erasmus 25th anniversary Conference taking place in Copenhagen on the 8-9th of May. The event will involve a visible and loud flash mob in central Copenhagen, sightseeing for students, pub crawling and an ESN party to end the evening. 400-500 students are expected taking part of this event.

ESN Lund will continue to work on the professionalization of the section and the cooperation with other student organizations in Lund as well as with other sections in the region. The section aims to continue as one of the most active sections in the network by providing the National and International level with professional and motivated ESN’ers. You will hear about ESN Lund also in the future! :)

Written by: Caroline Thurmann Morand