As ESC volunteers, the IntegrART team has seen its fair share of challenging weeks or days. The type of stretches of time when the work is coming at you quickly and there is just a lot to do! End of May was no different.
From May 24th to May 26th, we had a myriad of unique events planned, from Board Games to Podcasts, to finally helping manage two children’s festivals.
On Friday it was the Board Game day! What is nice about this specific event in general is that it is like a tradition of IntegrART now. The most recent volunteers before us had monthly Board Game events so we thought to follow in their footsteps and organise our own.
Thankfully, we are supported the whole way through by our project coordinators and the wonderful people working in Dworek Bialopradnicki. Without their help we could not have access to an awesome cellar “dungeon” which is borderline made for these types of events. Their help with advertisement and generally allowing us to use such a great location has helped us gain a consistently high participant rate as well. This only encourages us to think more about how we could improve the whole event: what we could add and what to remove.
Because of our lovely participants this time around we had received some new games to try out. Those being, Marvel Splendor and also Virus. It is always wonderful when someone brings their own game to the event.
And so all in all, the event was a huge success and we cannot wait to continue doing these in the future!
Moving forward, the following morning was the Neighbourhood day in Dworek. This, from what it seemed, was a sort of celebration of the important people to the local community. There were prizes, there were speeches, but most importantly for the kids there were lots and lots of extremely fun activities.
One of which was organised by firefighters. The idea was that a person would be strapped to a rope attached to a Fire Truck extendable pole and slowly climb boxes upon boxes when eventually the boxes would be knocked down and the participant would be hanging in the air for a few seconds. It looked fun and I wanted to try it out myself!
In addition to generally helping out different booths in their activities, we also had a couple more bigger things planned that day!
One of which was recording the newest episode of Mila’s podcast “Plan B”. This time it had focused on what it means to be an artist in today’s age and how can an artist really feel legit. A great listen if you ever have the time. You can find it on JAZZKULTURA Radio.
And the other thing was the most exciting of all. Another edition in our seasonal concerts! We had a couple in Winter and on this day we were to have our Spring one.
While some of us were quite nervous about singing in front of such an audience, others were extremely hyped up and excited about this opportunity. We had prepared 4 songs and sang as a sort of an Opening Band before some other more established artists came on stage.
All around, the concert went surprisingly super well and the reception was wonderful for it. We cannot wait for our next concert in September!
And now for the last day, May 26th. This time it was only Daniel and Joseph who were helping out with the Children’s day.
What was in store was taking care of some of the games, keeping an eye on the kids so they don’t do anything stupid and generally helping out with managing such a big event.
One highlight was the ice cream served in Dworek, as it is surprisingly really good! I especially recommend the Pistachio flavour!
There really isn’t much more to say about this day as it was quite calm and generally quite normal volunteer work!
It may be sometimes a bit difficult to work days upon days, but in the end it is always worth it. You gain so much from these experiences and learn a lot about yourself and others.
Thank you for reading through this blog post and stay tuned for our next one!
Hint on the topic: Rower.
