The Secretariat of ECY-Philippines delegation looks back and discuss on their meaningful experience of WYD 2013 during a group evaluation held recently. (Photo: ECY Facebook Page)
ANGAT, Bulacan, Sept. 16, 2013—After a little more than a month since World Youth Day (WYD) Rio, the fruit of the Episcopal Commission on Youth (ECY) – Philippines Delegation Secretariat evaluation of the country’s participation in WYD Rio is a commitment to improvement, a priest said.
“It is possible that we create and execute plans that may contain some short-cuts with the belief, ‘Everything is ok, everything is fine’. This is probably one area which needs more effort,” ECY-Philippines Delegation head Fr. Conegundo Garganta said during a mass following the Delegation Secretariat’s overnight evaluation last September 12 to 13.
WYD best practices
Though the Delegation Secretariat has yet to release a complete report on the specific areas for improvement for the next WYD in Krakow, Poland in 2016, Fr. Garganta admitted, the evaluation was also an opportunity to identify what was particularly commendable about the official Philippine delegation’s WYD participation that will most probably form a WYD best practices of sorts.
“In our evaluation, in the analysis that we did, there were a lot of good things and these encourage us. There are also things that call our attention to continue improving,” he added.
One of the strategies that will most probably be adopted for WYD Krakow is the close collaboration with partners, who are not necessarily part of the ECY or the National Secretariat for Youth Apostolate (NSYA).
Valuable collaboration
“Help that comes from others is very valuable. Beautiful, relevant and fruitful things happen with cooperation, not with a single movement or moving on our own,” Garganta, who is also the ECY executive secretary, added.
Things that are agreed upon bear fruit, he explained, and are even better when these are a result of mutual help.
As part of the dynamic for evaluation, Delegation Secretariat looked at the performance of the different teams involved in facilitating the participation of official Philippine pilgrims to the WYD, the Core, Accompaniment, Registration, Finance, Formation, and Documentation Teams.
Some 178 official Philippine delegates attended the WYD in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. [Nirva’ana Ella Delacruz]
