Hello Visioneers and friends! As usual, a lot has happened in recent months at Visioneers. Today, I want to inform you on some of these recent activities. |
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One Year Anniversary On April 15, 2015, Visioneers was founded through the work of a small group. Since then, we have built a sizeable team and started regular activities. |
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Ongoing Activities The sewing workshop held weekly by Julia at Café Connections continues to be very popular. Between ten and sixteen young people from the refugee community participate regularly in these workshops and in the concurrent homework club. It’s really amazing to witness how these young people have developed and see how well they now know the German language. Meanwhile, many of these youth have moved to new locations (previously they were based in Schöneberg), but still come to all activities. |
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Other ongoing activities include the Guitar lessons with Simon and the German lessons with Eva. Eva explains more about the latter in this video (in German): | | |
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Launch of the Mentoring Program We are really excited that our Mentoring Program has finally launched! Under a two-year horizon, refugees will be mentored by volunteers and be given the chance at traineeships with cooperating companies. In that, work preparation trainings will also be available once per month. The Mentoring Program is directed especially to teenagers and young adults from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Visioneers has already worked with these young people for many months in workshops and on social action days, and has built a close relationship with them. Through this program, we have brought together eleven refugee-mentor pairings and the first agreements acknowledging these relationships have been signed. I will, of course, keep you posted on further developments with this program. If you would like to read more about the program or have interest to become a mentor yourself, please have a look at this location: |
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Housing Information After a long wait, Omar (from Syria) has finally moved into a flatshare. If you know anyone, who has a free apartment, please do get in touch with us. We are on the search for apartments for refugees who participate in our mentoring program: | | |
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Employee Action Day with Daimler In April, ten employees from Daimler AG’s Berlin branch laid a new carpet in Café Connections, where a large portion of our activities take place. Why they did this and how much fun all participants had in the process can be seen in this short video (in German) and the end-result can be seen best in person through a visit to Café Connections! ;) |
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Wayfair Bake Sale End of March, Wayfair invited us to be involved in their “Wellness Week” and, alongside ten staff members, we organized a bake sale. Not only was it a lovely day but we also collected €450 for our mentoring program and workshops: | | |
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Zalando Volunteering Day An additional Corporate Volunteering event also took place in April: Joana from Zalando dropped by to give a few mentees a special computer course with 10 donated laptops from eBay. |
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Costa Rica Update Visioneers also remains active in Costa Rica. At present, David, Serina and Steven, from our partner project Uno+, are running a variety of workshops and extracurricular activities for the children in Jaco. Aside from that, we are also making progress in preparations for volunteer placements in Limón 2000, where we want to complete construction of sanitation facilities for the school. David has summarized what’s been happening at the building site to date in a recent blog entry. |
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Thanks to our Interns I would also like to take this moment to thank our interns who will finish their placements with us in mid-May. A big thank you to Mounna and Stefanie who helped in the development and construction of the mentoring program in the past three months. Muchas gracias to our Spanish interns Claudia and Tania from Ibiza, who were super helpful to Larry and Teri during the renovation work at Connections. And finally, many thanks to Anouchka from Canada, who has helped us with volunteering handbook, and supported Julia during her sewing workshops. I am excited about the future development of our many projects and wish you a wonderful start to this spring season. Yours sincerely, Natascha |
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