Throwback Wednesday: Stijn Jager

My name is Stijn Jager, 27 years old and I live in Gramsbergen. A born and bred Hardenberger, I left my hometown for Gramsbergen, a few kilometres from Hardenberg, for the first time in my life this year. I recently graduated and will start my new job as a Spatial Advisor next week. During the final period of my studies, I became politically active and this helped me in my personal development and as a kind of springboard for my starting career.

In autumn 2017, I became acquainted with the Hardenberg GroenLinks group and participated in the list of candidates for the 2018 municipal elections. Unfortunately, we just failed to win a seat and so Anne van den Hoek, and later in the year Romano Boshove were our group chair and sole councillor.

To support small parties like us, the Hardenberg City Council decided during 2018 to appoint shadow councillors, which would allow councillors to be better supported. For GroenLinks, I became one, in part because the shadow councillors must have been eligible for election and the rest of our active support group was not, or for other reasons did not fancy a role as a shadow councillor. On 16 October 2018, I took the oath of office and was officially installed as a shadow councillor.

From then on, it was possible for me (by agreement) to participate in orientation rounds instead of Romano. With my spatial expertise, it was fairly easy to make these choices; spatial topics such as reviewing zoning plans or the municipal Environmental Vision are often on the municipal council agenda.

I found my first year as a shadow councillor very enjoyable and instructive. With a small group like ours, it is not always possible to take part in all council activities, which is also quite difficult in a municipality with 29 cores of which you would prefer to know exactly what is going on in all 29. As Romano argued in our general reflections a few weeks ago, as a councillor or support group member you only really see what the residents of the municipality are up to.

For my work as a Spatial Advisor, I had been reckoning with some distance to a nice job for some time. Hardenberg is located in a remote corner of the Netherlands; after all, for the average HBO education one has to travel at least half an hour to an hour. So I used to see my future mainly outside my familiar municipality, and that did change somewhat because of what I learned as a shadow councillor. For work, I will still have to look outside my municipality to do my council work well.

Yet I have come to see more and more the qualities of Hardenberg as a place to live and work. Nature is great here, it is affordable and there are good amenities at a level befitting Hardenberg. Every year, thousands of tourists come to the Vecht valley to enjoy everything this region has to offer and it feels great to be able to live here.