BRIDGE IT: Part 2 — First contacts
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! ❤
To really understand feelings and life as an refugee we knew that we needed to meet them. Empathy is even more important when you don’t know a lot of the challenges the people are facing. That’s why this step was very important to our team. We also knew that to understand the whole “puzzle” we needed to meet volunteers, the representatives of organisations, ex-refugees and common people.
We made questions for refugees, volunteers and representatives of organization:
After that we searched though the internet to find shelters contact information in Athens. We contacted Red Cross, Greek council for refugees, Caritas Athens, Orange house and Melissa network. We had also couple of Erasmus friends who were working as an volunteers in Athens so we decided to contact them too. The plan was to get 3–5 interviews.
In this stage we faced the biggest difficulty during our journey. Organizations weren’t responding to us or if they did the answer was strict no. Luckily we were able to interview one of the Erasmus girls who was volunteering in Athens. She worked in one refugee shelter and promised us to take two of her volunteering friends with her when we would meet.
This changed our way of thinking and we decided to focus on more volunteers and their needs. We weren’t allowed to meet refugees and representatives of organizations so this made us think that the community is really closed and they don’t want us to find out possible challenges and help them solve them. Our next step will be to interview these volunteers and empathy their experiences in volunteering.
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
