Dear friends of Loesje,
Although our daily life routines may seem to be coming to a complete halt due to the corona virus floating around the world, the Loesje Berlin team, like the international Loesje community, is staying active through continuing to spread Loesje posters. We send a huge shout out to all the active Loesje groups, and your work to spread our collective voices. In these moments of panic and stress, it is comforting to see the Loesje community is staying united in spreading awareness on current social issues and our solidarity with marginalized communities and peoples continues.
If you want to join us for the next online text writing (EN/DE), Wednesday 25.3. at 3pm, send an email to Sam@loesje.de and he will send you the information.
We would like to start off by introducing the most recent working member of the Loesje Berlin office, Samuel Ponce. Since living in Berlin, Samuel has completed a masters program from Alice Salomon Hochschule in Intercultural Conflict Management. He initially connected to Loesje by participating in one of Loesje’s projects and has gradually become more involved, being a cook for the Loesje training courses facilitated at the Pro-Social Hostel in Marzahn, participating in the qualification exchange round, and since end of last year supporting Rola in the office. One thing that Sam is looking forward to doing in Loesje Berlin is to start facilitating Loesje creative text writing in Spanish.
Loesje Berlin is also excited to announce our two new long-term projects: the strategic partnership “How much Freedom of Speech can a democracy tolerate” with the partner organizations Ljubljana Pride and INAR (Irish Network Against Racism). Ljubljana Pride acts as a youth, voluntary, independent and non-profit civil society organization established with the aim of safeguarding the human rights and interests of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) population of Slovenia. INAR is a national network of over 100 anti-racism civil society organisations which aims to work collectively to highlight and address racism in Ireland. In this partnership, our main aim is in combating hate speech that occurs in public spaces. We will for two years combine the strengths of each organization to equip youth workers with the skills to understand the roots of hate speech and discrimination, staying critical and collectively coming up with actions to transform any hate speech that can potentially be seen in our local environments.
This project will be running simultaneously with a transnational youth initiative that is in cooperation with Ljubljana Pride. In this youth initiative, we are aiming to empower youth to actively address hate speech seen in public spaces. Through the dissemination and exchanges of Loesje’s creative text writing methodology and the “Decontramination” methodology shared by Ljubljana Pride, we will work to actively combat hate speech in the streets. Decontramination stands for changing hateful messages into loving positive ones. Both projects are funded by the Erasmus + program. If you are interested in getting involved with either of these projects, also contact Sam@loesje.de to find out what activities are coming up. We will definitely keep working diligently to overcome these current issues that seem to be putting a stop to our physical social interactions. More than likely, we will be seeing each other through computer screens the next weeks to come, but it won’t stop our collective efforts to spread tolerance and acceptance in the world around us. We wish you all health and mental well-being while staying indoors. We look forward to when we can all gather and be physically present with one another. We send you all big hugs and loads of love.
Kind regards,
The Loesje Berlin Team
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