Our Anne is participating in the first phase of Tandem Europe 2019. This is what idea emerged from that awesome experience.
Have you heard of Tandem Europe? No? Well, “made for people who work on creative solutions that make social innovation possible throughout the EU, the programme stimulates strategic thinking in organisational renewal processes, helps to create and sustain culturally innovative effects across sectors, disciplines and borders, and explores creative and collaborative solutions for contemporary challenges in our societies.”
In other words, the programme brought together 32 cultural managers from Europe in Sofia, Bulgaria in early March, hosted by the supersheroes & heroes of Ideas Factory. The creative managers had to pair themselves in no time (2 days!) and to work on a 1-year project proposal. If it gets approved, after July the tandem is able to implement the idea in reality and work on it togeter by visiting each other’s organisations and communities. How wonderful!
Besides the awesome opportunity to work on an idea with a brand new partner-in-crime, it was a really good networking event where these 32 social changers met and exchanged ideas, contacts and future opportunities!
Meet our new tandem: Lisa and Anne
It was quite a challenge to find a partner from these 31 inspiring humans in two days —intense pressure, lots of emotions, but at the end everything was in the right place! Our Anne was super lucky to find the perfect partner — Lisa!
Lisa: Our organisations have one main thing in common: We are connecting people and places. Although we do it in different ways with different methods this process can bring them together perfectly well and create a new way of working.
Lisa’s organisation, the Raumpioniere Agentur für StadtmacherInnen GmbH was founded in 2017 and is managed by Jan Gartner (CEO, Founder, Partner) and Lisa Reimitz-Wachberger (CEO, Partner). The Agency provides a service range from participative processes for both rural and urban communities, cities, neighborhoods, event planning with focus on urban and rural issues and public space to Urban/Civic Crowdfunding. Raumpioniere Agency developed and hosts the Urban Crowdfunding Plattform raumpioniere.at, where project initiants receive professional consultancy specialised for urban, rural, social Crowdfunding campaigns and also benefit from Raumpioniere´s additional offer in Crowdsourcing and Crowdengaging.
Anne: Nomadways wants to collaborate with Raumpioniere to create an activity bridge between our very rural co-creation and co-working space and an urban one, and learn how it is run there, what works, what doesn’t, to get inspired for our own work. Hopefully, this will help us improve our service, bringing in new offers in our community.
Both our organisations believe in connecting people to create synergies, inspiration, support and initiatives for the common good. We both work to make this happen in our respective environment and now can hopefully make it happen at a broader scale, between our two environments and beyond. Our biggest difference lies in our geographical implantation: Raumpioniere in a buzzing capital city, Nomadways in a quiet rural area. This makes our approaches different and our collaboration rather unconventional, especially beyond national borders.
21 Stories
Are you curious what idea they came up with? Here we go!
The collaboration creates bridges between countries, rural and urban world, people of various fields of activities, exploring ways for people to connect, interact, support each other and develop their feeling of belonging together. In a period of polarising medias, rising socio-economical inequalities and ever more patent political exclusion, Raumpioniere’s and Nomadways’ work has never had such urgency.
21 stories concept is to create moments of connection in their communities through storytelling. It addresses a challenge that both specific target groups from their areas share: being left aside, forgotten by public policies because of their geographical and social background.
In Vienna, Lisa wants to work with people from the 21st district, across the Danube from the rest of the city. That district and its people seem to be left out from most of the vibrant sociocultural life of the Austrian capital.
In Brivezac, Anne works with the rural population of the region (that is, the least populated region of France), who also expresses bitterness from seeing its youth going away to the city, leaving ever more deserted villages seeming more and more lifeless, and its inhabitants feeling left alone and isolated.
Anne and Lisa decided to address this issue by creating moments of human connection through culture, by making people feel connected to one another, belonging to a community that is full of life and action.
To do this, they will invite local artists in residency in our areas, where they will work with the inhabitants and create storytelling events when the sharing of personal and cultural stories will connect people. To deepen the work, they decided to try and work in particular with the elderly, trying to design and host the final storytelling events in their homes.
Now, imagine a quiet Winter afternoon. A cosy home with a fireplace in the rural area. People gather inside the house of the local host to listen and tell stories. From here, from everywhere. Food is on the table — everyone has brought something home-cooked. The story begins…
Fingers crossed this project would become real. Meanwhile, we enjoy the thought of it very much and prepare our application for Tandem Europe. Wish us luck!
About Nomadways
We craft international workshops for artists, educators and youth workers. Together we create pedagogical artwork, share and invent practical solutions to social problems.
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