Under beaming sunlight the volunteer program committee came together in the end of February above the rooftops of Osnabrück.

While the Friday evening was spent with exuberant hugging, Saturday we aimed high: after a short input of a representative of our partner organisation Ts’ununetik we had discussions, evaluations, organizing and envisioning; besides a critical view on our past processes the question of ‘where to’ was central in our discussion. Where do we see the committee inside the association? What role does that play in our vision? How can we articulate our critique? What spaces can we open up for partnership-oriented processes?

Even if the old bird might have the feeling of a déja-vu in reading these questions, we actually achieved a consensus on several of those topics. So you can be excited for a few new features, may it be in the form of new positions or critical texts.

As a small pre-view we want to enthusiastically present to you our new name – FreDi -(short for ‘Freiwilligendienst’, meaning volunteer service in German) with an appropriate new mascot – the penguin.

It were three very productive days where we achieved a lot as a whole and now we can hopefully start off into the following months fully rested and motivated and make our volunteer program better step by step.