As part of the FEIF committee meetings, the discussions of the Youth Department centred around the evaluation of past and the planning of future events: this summer’s FEIF YouthCup which was brilliantly hosted by Switzerland, and the most recent FEIF Young Leaders’ Seminar, which took place in Sweden, had only just finished at the beginning of October. Both events received overwhelmingly positive feedback, and we thank the organisers who enabled us to spread the seeds of happy memories and new friendship across the FEIF world.

Looking into the future, we are glad to announce that the next FEIF Youth Camp (2025) will be in Iceland – dates to be released soon- and the next YouthCup (2026) will take place in Germany. Another big topic of discussion was how FEIF Youth can best support the development of the best qualities of the young rider and horse person. We live in a time that brings ever faster change to almost every aspect of life, and thus the approach to how to teach and immerse children and young people in the Icelandic horse culture, skills and values, needs to adapt. To that point there were good discussions with the education department about teaching the young or beginner rider and how to install horse welfare principles in every encounter with the horse. Somewhat to our surprise other departments had similar conversations regarding ways to introduce shared values to young people throughout our communities. The work of FEIF is structured into 5 distinct departments, but at times it is a great joy to really experience that ultimately we are striving for the same things.