S2: Vostel of Berlin #53

 Season 2: Vostel of Berlin with Hanna Lutz Romy interviews Hanna Lutz of social enterprise Vostel in Berlin.  Vostel is an online platform matching volunteers with Berlin organizations. Hear about how they found a way to engage tourists, refugees, and everyday talented people to help their city. Hanna Lutz and Stefanie Frost of Vostel   Transcript Romy:  Welcome to this episode of Bonfires of Social Enterprise . This is Romy and I had a chance to interview Hanna Lutz in Berlin, Germany. Vostel is an online platform designed to match up volunteers with the serving needs of some of the organizations in Berlin. I found it interesting that Vostel was created out of an idea to help tourists engage in a healthier manner with the beautiful city of Berlin. As you will learn, Vostel now engages many of the refugees as volunteers. Prior to the interview, Hanna and I had a chance to talk about the fact that everyone from the locals to the government officials were attempting to figure out how to have a better relationship with the tourists, and who would have thought that it would be to ask them to get involved beyond their tourism! To leave something behind in the form of serving instead of just take pictures and memories. By the way, if you have never tried something like this, we suggest you attempt it. Working side by side with the local residents is a wonderful way to make lifelong relationships. And, I would note, good relationships are something we all could use more of these days. So, let’s listen in to a part of my interview with Hanna Lutz of Vostel.   Hanna: Okay, Vostel is a social business from Berlin. It aims to connect people that want to help get involved in social, ecological and cultural projects in Berlin, but organizations and initiatives that are easy just to get involved with a few clicks. So what we do is actually show them the schedules of the different organizations that say, oh we need to help every Wednesday from nine to twelve. And so all the volunteers in our page can actually just sign up and go to the projects right away… For instance, if you were in Berlin and you would like to get involved tonight you can just type in the date of today, and you will definitely find a project where you can hop in and do valuable help. Hanna: Exactly. So far it has been rather tough for people to actually find projects in Berlin. Especially if they’re non-German speakers. Just your clicks through all the websites and actually find possibilities where they can get involved without actually need to speak any German. Now they have Vostel and can easily find a bunch of projects that sometimes even need help from non‐German speakers. Yes. Romy: Wow. And how did you get started with this Hanna, as the co‐founder? Hanna: Like, three years ago a very good friend of mine, and me, we actually met in Canada, and we were doing our studies abroad. We did some traveling through Latin America and by this time in Berlin was a big conflict concerning the tourists because there is more and more coming and we really appreciate that. But there is a lot of people who say, oh, they just come and consume the city and really leave nothing but rubbish and noise, so to say. Then we decided to create a volunteering platform that allows people that are in Berlin only short term and don’t speak German actually to get involved in the good communities and get to know the city from a different perspective. So what we did was just kind of collecting a bunch of projects that didn’t demand too many skills and didn’t demand long term commitment and didn’t demand German skills. So we decided we should really build up this project, not only stay as an...