My Changemaker Tour in Northern Europe 🎙| Season 2 @mediajaag

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, Catherine Nicholson, the producer of The Agency in Battersea, told me the story of this organization and how it works in detail.

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, you’ll listen the story of Dulcie Usher, she’s 22 years old and she’s part of the Cycle 2 of The Agency. Her project ? She’s leading Horizon Retreats, a programme taking young women at risk on retreats to broaden their horizons.

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, you’ll listen the story of Prince, he’s 24 years old and he’s part of the Cycle 2 of The Agency. His project ? He’s leading ViZION, a community album created with young talent from across Wandsworth, in the south of London. Credits for the picture : The Agency.

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, i met Mikhi, he’s 16 and he joined The Agency this year. He received a micro-grant to pursue his passion for photography and be a documenter for the different projects.

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, you’ll listen the story of Sydney, she did The Agency six years ago and her project was “Sydney natural” which was a skin care line that uses only natural ingredients. She’s now a mentor for the project of Dulcie.

The Agency in UK supports and empowers young people to make positive change in their communities through social enterprises. For my very first interview of this Changemaker Tour, I made a visit to The Agency offices in London, located in the Battersea Arts Centre, and i asked questions to the young people, producer and leaders part of this organization. In this episode, you’ll listen the story of Kay Rufai with the Agency in Battersea. Kay is a leader artist and supports the young people in their projects.

Marie Dobenesque is a corporate changemaker, she tries to tackle the obsolete codes of hierarchical leadership in her enterprise with a group of 10 volunteers. Beside, she has started a side project called Corporate Game Changers (CGC) to help others to become corporate changemakers as well !

I made a visit to the Repair Cafe De Meevaart located in the North-East part of Amsterdam. Inside, on the first three Wednesdays of the month and the last Saturday of the month, volunteers of all ages and all nationalities organize repair sessions for objects such as vacuum cleaners and maaany coffee machines. This, in order to avoid people buying them back unnecessarily and save tons of waste. I had a very interesting discussion on many different points with Kim, the leader of the place, the mother as she is called here. Martine Postma who created the very first Repair Cafe in Amsterdam in 2009, regularly visits the team, between 2 trips abroad, because her concept is present now all over the world.

She’s only 22 and she’s already a sustainable young leader in Holland. Annabella Rijksen was running Block-E, with its team in 2018-2019, as an experimentation in the field of Clean Energy. Block-E is a little powerbank, that looks like as a wallet and that can be charged while cycling. From there, energy can be transferred via a Dock: a payment system which allows us make transactions with the green currency generated.

I Amsterdam, I talked with Niek Oldenburg, the co-founder of We Future, a team of dedicated change-makers from all over the world. They are developing a sustainable digital platform that will promote, educate and connect people in order to provide assistance to the conservation and protection of the earth and all living organisms.

I wanted so bad to see this sustainable floating village called Schoonschip (105 inhabitants, 46 houseolds, 30 floating plots, 500 solar panels...) from my own eyes. Meeting for 2 hours in the North of Amsterdam its co-founder Marjan De Blok who has worked on this project for 12 years of her life in partnership especially with the inhabitants was incredible. I even had the chance to visit her floating house. As a television producer, Marjan De Blok started from scratch in 2008 when she first started to work on what will become the most sustainable floating village in Europe twelve years later, in January 2020. She shows us how we can accomplish huge things with passion and dedication.

Rajiv Raj Jagasia is a real changemaker with great values trying to tackle the problem of textile pollution. He took 3 years to think about his concept : KLOTHBERG. With his wife by his side as co-founder, they’re working with ethical factories in India to make happen the ideas of their community of fashion ethical designers and bring conscious and ecological friendly products to wholesale business platform.

Kolja Kugler is the kind of artist you don’t often meet in your life. With its robot band, the One love Machine Band, made entirely from his own hands using scrap metals found in scrapyard, he performs music shows all over the world and proves to us how imagination and creativity is an endless world that can really help as well the planet. Meeting him on the Wild Waste Gallery site, a super creative alternative place in Prenzlauer Berg, where he is working with other groups of artists, opened my eyes to a parallel and magical world where imagination reigns, like a feeling of coming back to childhood.

Luise Beier is the co-founder of the Breakout Café, it’s a social café trying to have an impact on its local community in Kreuzberg, in Berlin. It offers a first job opportunity for young people and refugees. But more than that, it tries to give them confidence, a passion, a reason to grow in their daily life.

In Berlin, i met Simon Thies. He is part of the management team of Green City Solutions, the initiators of the City Tree. We talked for one hour about his story and this innovation that cleans air in urban cities in combination of engineering, irrigation, moss and IOT.

A new place of worship called House Of One in Berlin will allow people of different faith to pray side by side in about 4 years. This interreligious project founded by Christians, Muslims and Jewish aims to build a building that will be at the same time a synagogue, a church and a mosquee. I had the chance to talk with representatives of the 3 communities involved in this unique project : Frithjof Timm, for the Christian Community, Esther Hirsch, for the Jewish Community and Osman Örs for the Muslim Community. They told me about their wish to bring people together into dialogue.

Luise and Anny are two inspiring and passionate young womens. With their movement, the Mindful Movement, they’re trying to help people finding out their true potential and creating meaningful lives and work through mindfulness, self-discovery and social entrepreneurship education.

In Copenhagen, i met Peter Just, the founder and CEO of Hubbster, in his offices near Christiana. With his team and his partners in the world, he wants to tackle the problem of the "connected loneliness", it means that people can be physically isolated due to the spread of digital technology. As a solution, Hubbster tries to connect people of all ages, and develop their creativity, in public spaces thanks to connected little boxes or "hubs" full of 20 different games (like Petanque, Ping Pong, Beach Volley, Street Basketball, Football, Pole Tennis, Kubb, or Möllky). Our talk was really inspiring, we talked about the real problem here to solve, how does Hubbster work in detail but also how did they overcome the difficulties, how will they adapt their concept elsewhere and even the impact of Bryant Park, in NYC, as an inspiration.

The Human Library or « Menneskebiblioteket » is an international organization and movement created in Copenhagen in 2000 by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen. This concept is about offering people as books, a sort of human books. Books have titles that aim to represent a stigmatized or stereotyped group of people in the community. As Camilla Ibsen, the national events coordinator in Denmark for the Human Library told me, adults, students can chat, during private or public events, for the first time with people they would never have met in their daily lives.

Oslo Soup is a micro-funding foodie experience. The Oslo Soup team : Tara, Nikkie, Margot, Lucy and Leeanne organize 3 events a year for which they try to reach local community projects in Oslo and help to fund them in small ways that can make their community idea really happen. People coming at these events make a donation (Oslo Soup recommend 50 Nok), listen to 4 people pitch their community idea and can vote for the project they would like to support, they also get soup, bread, cake...At the end of the evening, the project with the most votes gets the collected donations.

Interview with Elin Fjellvang who is part of a gardening project in Oslo called « Voksenenga Nærmiljøhage ». It’s a community garden that focuses on growing organic vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruits and berries. During the spring, summer and fall, young and old come together, as part of workshops and social activities, to learn, build and share in the community spirit.