We joined forces with other European organizations and met at an international meeting in Germany to share good practice.
Frankfurt am Main is a small town with about 50,000 inhabitants located directly on the border with Poland – both states are naturally separated by the river Odra, across which leads a bridge from the center of Frankfurt directly to the Polish Slubice. Both cities are thus in a very close connection and you can really know it at every step. Whether you notice Polish signs in the center of Frankfurt or lots of people commuting daily to work in a neighboring city / state.
The main goals of the meeting were mainly:
- increasing the quality of services
- improving work with digital technologies and new media
- more effective communication with the public and target groups
- acquiring the skills of evaluation, assessment of our needs and data analysis
- strengthening human resources capacity and civic engagement in our local communities.
Program of the international meeting
Thursday 16th September 2021
The Czech and Slovak teams took a train in the early morning hours to arrive in Frankfurt am Main in the afternoon. Unfortunately, due to terrible delays, we did not catch another train and we had 4 hours of squatting in Prague, which we enjoyed with a good lunch. Finally, we boarded a bus to Berlin and from there we moved by train to the destination station, where we are instead of the original 16 hours they arrived at 10pm in the afternoon evening. The international meeting started really fun. Our Romanian colelagues had even worse trip to Germany though. Did you know there is more than 1 Frankfurt only? Well, now we all know and we will book the right flight tickets.
After exhausing but fun travel, the German team welcomes us on the train station and our international meeting could begin!
Friday 17th September 2021
Our German partners took us to visit Frankfurt Oder, we we could better understand the local society, history and learn more about societal challenges that local families and the youngsters. We also managed to visit the Polish side of the city – Slubice. A lot of young people from Slubice actually participate in the cross-border events of our German partner. The office of Pewobe impressed us with its excellent location, clean and airy interior and equipment full of modern technology and, of course, the coffee machine, which was loaded to the maximum during the whole meeting. We had already spent the rest of the day in the office, with each organization given space to perform and reflect on the activities and services it had given before, during and after the covid-19 pandemic, and finally it was time to assess the current situation. We smoothly reached the difficulties that each organization faced / faced and the ways to deal with them. We ended the day in an excellent Polish restaurant „across the river“.
Saturday 18th September 2021
Saturday morning was dedicated to evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of organizations, the opportunities they may have, and aspects that need to be strengthened. In the afternoon, we performed an analysis of our activities on social networks and we were able to roughly identify what has proven to be working well in the past and what, on the contrary, what did not work at all.
In the evening, we took part in a nice “Discover Syria” event, organized by young people from Syria who are currently in Frankfurt and wanted to introduce locals to their culture through presentations, food tastings and live music. This event was part of a Solidarity project, that local volunteers and refugees from Syria wrote with the support of Pewobe management. It was an excellent example of good practice, how to work with youngerst with fewer opportunities, how to empower them, enhance their skills and help them to engage in the local society.
Sunday 19th September 2021
Sunday was a working day for us like any other. We jointly assessed the needs that the organization should meet both for itself and for the participants. In the afternoon, we summarized everything we discussed in the previous days and together we defined the goals that we will try to achieve by the next meeting, which will take place here in Brno. The next meeting will be learning, teaching, training activity and will be focused on ehancing our digital skills!
Monday 20th September 2021
On this day, we handled the necessary administration for the project and also for the final report. The rest of the day was „only“ travel – so we had a pleasant 9 hours on the train. On the train, Czech and the Slovak team still had the opportunity to reflect on the entire meeting and communicate them to the rest of our organizations.
