In Strasbourg, the local branch of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF), an independent youth organisation closely linked to the Communist Party, has started experimenting with a new way of reaching out to a wider audience: revision sessions.
The inaugural Révisions Solidaires session, which doubled as a workshop for working on university application motivation letters and CVs, took place on the Friday right before mock exam week started at my school (where the Communists have a larger-than-average following). Intrigued, I decided to go, partly out of a genuine need to revise, but mainly out of curiosity. Here’s the positives and negatives from my experience.
A fresh take on youth engagement
The event was held in the local headquarters of the Communist Party. I was mildly disappointed to find out that the focus of the session was indeed on revision. The only attempt to “propagandise” us was at the very end when they politely asked if we would like to take a pamphlet or two as we were leaving. It turns out that they were genuine about providing somewhere to “revise for your baccalaureate with young people of your age in a calm place”. The whole session was really relaxed, with complimentary juice, biscuits, and wifi for those who needed it.
The organisers themselves also got to work. They were in their twenties (it is a youth organisation after all), and spent most of the two-hour long session working on and updating their CVs. They also got each other to review them and evaluate whether it would work for a certain job or university application. Part of the intention behind the revision session was that those of us revising could help each other out too, but we were all focusing on classes that we didn’t share. Low attendance was definitely to blame for this.
Learning from experience
In fact, it wasn’t a total success, as many of the people who had apparently expressed interest failed to materialise, leaving me as the sole non-communist attendee. They had also planned to have some of the most academic people in their ranks come along so that they could help or guide us if we had difficulty with the subject matter, but the person that they had in mind ultimately wasn’t available that evening due to scheduling conflicts. Part of the reason for this was that the time slot that they had been able to secure for use of the Communist Party headquarters was right after school on a Friday evening, a time when academic motivation is usually waning for many people.
Looking ahead, the organisers said that they planned on doing more of these sessions, especially as final exams approach. They also intend to organise the sessions further in advance so as to secure better time slots, and to hold them at regular intervals. They didn’t have a clear plan on how to get people to come to these hypothetical better-timed revision sessions though. Their current plan, which it seems would have worked out fairly well if the session weren’t on a Friday evening, was to use word-of-mouth and pamphlet distribution through highschoolers in the organisation, which is how I heard about it.
Shift to digital for future success
That being said, it probably would have been a lot cheaper for the organisation if my friend had just sent me a social media post announcing the event (of which, as far as I can tell, there were none), rather than distributing small pamphlets about it to friends and acquaintances. That would also have been more convenient for me because I lost the pamphlet, and had to ask him when and where the event was using my phone anyway. The session seemed to have been fairly hastily organised too, making it even more perplexing that they had the time to print pamphlets but not to make a social media post.
While this may have been a long-term plan to find new recruits, it certainly wasn’t branded as such. The social media post about the event that they made to announce the fact that it had happened said: “Faithful to our values of mutual aid and solidarity we have organised our first révisions solidaire and workshop for CVs and motivation letters for Parcoursup (the French higher education applications platform)”, and that was very much how it was framed at the actual session too. Unlike most, if not all, of their other activities, this one had no explicit political aim, except perhaps as a PR move.
A subtle shift in strategy
While the success of the Révisions Solidaires session may have been limited, it seems like the organisers learned valuable lessons for future endeavours, and plan to continue with the concept. Whether this initiative will yield new recruits one day or not remains to be seen, but it highlights the diversity of approaches organisations can take to engage with a younger generation.