Within the last months a little group of people found each other to create a new working group within the FSE especially to support children and young cavers – European Children and Young Cavers (ECYC).

This new working group intends to promote and support especially children and young cavers in speleology. Children are always open for new interesting activities, especially in nature. They do like sports and at the same time they are curious to discover and understand the world around them. For children it is often more difficult to get in touch with the speleo community. Therefore it is only logical to focus with one working group especially on children and young people.

Today’s children are the future adults or even cavers sensitized for the significance of underground exploration, science and protection. The speleo community has a accumulated knowledge of experts, from which the next generation should benefit. The range of possible activities and projects is quite big, for example, preparation of educational material about cave related topics (e.g. science, cave protection, technics) in different languages, speleo training, support for science projects related to caves and karst, support for cave protection activities, support for mapping and cave photography workshops especially for young people, an online platform especially for children and young cavers….

The first public meeting of the ECYC with interested cavers took place at the EuroSpeleo Forum 2023 in Breitscheid, Germany.

On the photo from left to right are: Malte Voß, Lorenz Ketter, Christiane Meyer, Jean-Claude Thies, Alena Gessert, Maria Amparo Perez and Claude Boes.

We think that the children and young people are worth to be in our spotlights. If you are also interested to put the children in your spotlight, get in touch with us at youngcavers@eurospeleo.eu

Christiane Meyer

Head of the European Children and Young Cavers working group (ECYC)