A Year of New Beginnings and Welcoming Ends.
The pandemic has become part of our lives and all our operations have been adapted to fit the new ways of connecting and working. Roots Guide and Rural Migrantours have been our two main prioroties for this year.
Roots Guide
After five years, Roots Guide finally went into print after a succesful crowdfunding campaign on the Voordekunst platform where we received 122 donations worth € 8.105. Roots Guide guidebook will go in print and be ready for sales in 2022. The toolkit will be wrapped up next year.
We welcomed the end of this chapter of Roots Guide and look forward to take Roots Guide into the next level next year.
Rural migrantour project
The European supported project ‘Rural Migrantour’ was launched in March this year. Rural Migrantour is a spin-off of the regular Migrantour. Migrantour intercultural urban walks is an innovative tool of integration led by intercultural guides with immigrant backgrounds in 16 European cities since 2010. These intercultural guides bring their own perceptions and perspectives of the city in which they live into the broader context of local migration history. Rural Migrantour, however, aims to strengthen and expand the success and innovation of the Migrantour network in rural parts of Europe.
We plan to develop tour itineraries, story maps, virtual walks and a collection of roles that will mobilize, upgrade and highlight the best practices of Migrantour cities and adapt them to rural Europe. aim to promote cultural heritage perspectives within the EU; creating a narrative of cultural heritage through the stories of vulnerable communities.
Pocket Stories main role is to facilitate the learning process of the other partners by bringing in our expertise and experience from Roots Guide.
Our in-person meeting in Slovenia and our first training in Italy had to be postponed and replaced with online meetings due to the pandemic. We hope to resume these meetings next year when it is safer for everyone to gather. In the meantime we been part of have developing feasibility studies that will support all partners in their creation of rural migrantours.
*Rural Migrantour* is an #ErasmusPlus KA2 project that brings together five organisations Terra Vera (Slovenia), Stichting Pocket Stories (The Netherlands), Viaggi Solidali (Italy), Paths of Greece (Greece), and LAG Svilengrad (Bulgaria).
New Board Member
We welcomed Razan Damlakhi as our new board members who will guide Pocket Stories in the new year with published Roots Guide and Rural Migrantours as two main projects.