Direct Action in Wichita

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Elena Carbunaru (Romania), Robert Bekefi (Hungary) and Vladislav Petkov (Bulgaria), who are doing their internship in Wichita, Kansas, took part in a direct action that took place on October 15th 2013. The protest happened during Kansas Policy Institute’s annual dinner in Wichita.

KPI is part of American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC) and is connected to manipulative researches that feed bad policy and legislation proposals in the sphere of education, healthcare and environment. The protest was organized in collaboration between trade unions and community organizations and groups, among which Sunflower Community Action, Wichita.

European fellows visited Tim Griffin’s office in Little Rock

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Kalina Hristova (Bulgaria) and Oana Botezan (Romania) with Arkansas Community Organizations were part of the group that visited U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin’s office in Little Rock delivering a letter calling for him to vote to end the government shut down, lift the debt ceiling, end the automatic spending cuts and raise revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes. ACO was coordinator of the meeting.

More info: http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2013/10/15/pastorjudge-urges-tim-griffin-to-reopen-federal-government

European fellows volunteering at the Immigration Reforming March in Chicago

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Korean immigrants and Slovak fellow Boba during the march in Chicago

European fellows from Hungary (Zsofi), Bulgaria (Victoria), Slovakia (Boba) and Romania (Laura) did also a bit of volunteering on Saturday (October 12, 2013) in Chicago. Boba and Laura helped their co-fellows Zsofi and Victoria (from the same fellowship program in U.S., coordinated by Great Lakes Consortium for international training and development & thanks to U.S. department financial support) during very interesting march on immigration reform, organized by one of the hosting organization ICIRR.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights is a statewide coalition of more than 130 organizations dedicated to promoting the rights of immigrants and refugees to full and equal participation in the civic, cultural, social, and political life of our diverse society.

European fellows Zsofia and Victoria as ICIRR volunteers at immigration reform march in Chicago – 12 October 2013

Thousands of immigrant leaders and families and allies from immigrant rights, labor, faith communities marched on October 12th to demand that Congress should pass immigration reform with dignity, justice and respect for all immigrants.
The action started at Teamster city at 12pm and it ended around 4pm at Daley Plaza in Chicago city. Zsofi and Victoria prepared the banners and posters for the march and helped organizers to gather people from different neighborhoods of Chicago. Laura and Boba took photos, videos and made notes for their reports. The marching people demanded that the federal government should halt deportations, stop the further criminalization of immigrants, and pass legalization that includes a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants. We could see hundreds of banners and posters with slogans like: “Legalizacion ahora”, “Obama, escucha! Estamos en la lucha!”; and we could hear the sentences like: “Stop the deportations.”; “Families together.”; “Enough is enough.”

The Most Important idea that we’ve learn that day was: How powerful and strong one crowd of thousands of courageous people can be – when it’s well organized (people stand together to achieve their goal – basic human rights). It can have very strong influence on politicians & decision makers!

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The Fall European Delegation is ready to explore Community Organizing in U.S.

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The second European delegation with 19 fellows will be in  the U.S. from September 30 – November 9, 2013. They will participate in group seminars, round-table discussions, site visits, and had interactions with United States leaders. A tailored 3-week internship with mentoring, multicultural events, and participation in volunteer activities as well as in the Professional Fellows Congress in Washington, D.C. will also be included in the 6-week professional fellows program. Participants will prepare a 6-9 month  individual and group Action Plan for follow on activities. They  will have opportunities to experience the American family life and the diversity in the U.S. through staying with American host families during showbox download their internship in Little Rock (Arkansas), Chicago (Illinois), Manchester (New Hampshire), Langley Park (Maryland), Toledo (Ohio), Detroit (Michigan)  Wichita (Kansas), St. Paul (Minnesota), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania and   New York (New York).

Download in PDF – Fall European Delegation

26 alumni successfully completed their projects

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During the spring/summer of 2013 the Great Lakes Consortium announced a small grant application opportunity to any of the 2012 alumni for them to complete some projects. Small grants (under $2,000 each) helped to cover expenses of the projects but alumni contributed their volunteer time, brought in additional resources and engaged others to do the same. Small grant support was also available to create training materials or other publications that are connected to this exchange program so more people can benefit from the experience. From the four countries altogether 26 of the 32 alumni submitted applications and successfully completed their projects by August 30, 2013.

They proposed and implemented a variety of activities including issue organizing, parent and/or youth organizing, training/seminar/workshops, involving disadvantaged people from urban or rural communities, with special emphasis on Roma and disabled people. As pokemon go gps signal not found a result thousands of people became familiar with com-munity organizing and many of them were youth who got very interested to continue this type of community work. In the small grant projects alumni collaborated with others who participated in different exchanges and they brought back different experience to share. Some U.S. mentors also helped the alumni in the organizing in Europe and/or preparing training materials.

Read more about the activities in the newsletter

2nd In Bound Delegation

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2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Meet the Fall European Delegations

2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Volunteering in U.S.

2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Professional Fellows Congress

2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Photo Competition at the Fellows Congress

2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Direct Actions

2nd In-Bound Newsletter – Testimony

Testimonies

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Read the testimony of the 1st EU Fellowship Delegation who visited USA

Read the testimony of the 1st U.S. Mentor Delegation who visited Europe during the summer.