BRIDGE IT: Part 8 — What we’ve learnt.
We are four girls all over Europe and our Bridge it! -team is helping volunteers to become better in their work. The aim of Bridge it! is to connect volunteers to each other and to provide valid information and education to them across countries. If you are planning to become a volunteer or if you are already volunteering just be a Bridge and join us here: (https://sticklkata.wixsite.com/bridgeit). Welcome to share our journey in Medium! ❤
What we’ve learnt out of this project? The very first “lesson” for us was that our fail with the first idea wasn’t a bad thing. Thankfully to it we were led to the side of the project which is more interesting and could be more useful. We realised that may be we can do even more if we will help volunteers, because by this way we can reach more people and more people can help more refugees, so basically we can have a bigger impact. Our failure taught us how important are the contacts.
When we started from the beginning after a failure it wasn’t very easy for us to find people who can help us, but with time, we found them. Although sometimes it was uneasy to get useful information from our prototype users for the improvements.
What did we reach after all? We created a web-site and an Instagram profile. This time that we had wasn't enough to make a big change in this field, but we believe that our work and our tiny change will grow and will have a bigger impact in the future. We could say that for the moment the main impact is that we connected a few volunteers with each other an who knows? maybe they will be the initial stage of “Bridge It” volunteering group.
So, what would be the next steps? First of all, we should search for more people and build the community of “Bridge It”. We also have an idea to make a “mentor program” in which ex or actual volunteers would be a “helping hand” to the new ones, in order to bring them into this world of volunteering. We are planning to organise some events where interested people could get every information that they need in person. After all, with time we would like to collaborate with other organisations to be more effective and to be to help more.
Our team: Saara Kyllönen, Kata Stickl , Ivana Cervena and Svetlana Lukyanova
Our story: part 1 , part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9