Last week our team of IntegrART 6 had it’s first event – #beIntegrART Festival! It was one of the highlights of our project so far, thus we want to share how our ideas came to life and some behind the scenes stories from preparation of that evening.
So how it all started? Since it was International Volunteer Day coming up on December 5th, we knew we wanted to do something special dedicated to this day. After some brainstorming, we came up with an idea to organize a festival. #beIntegrART was an event for international youth living here in Krakow, in order to meet, share ideas and spend good time together. While running our projects at the cultural clubs, we began preparation for the festival. We tried to be as productive as possible, although for 2 weeks we weren’t together due to on-arrival training. We divided tasks based on what we wanted to do and created a picture of the event in our heads and on paper.
So, what was our plan for an event and how it turned out? Of course we had to plan every detail, but at the same time you have to be prepared for any last minute changes that can come up unexpectedly. We bought food for our guests and prepared tables for each activity of the festival. We were nervous and excited altogether, with hope that everything goes great!
Let us tell you a little bit about what we prepared. As our team shares love for music, we wanted to dedicate it to one of our activities. At the event, we created a special playlist, where each guest could add their favourite song. So at the end we had a perfect selection of songs from different genres, that represented how diverse music taste can be depending on our personalities, preferences and even nationalities! You can check our #beIntegrART playlist here.
Being active for natural environment is one of the priorities of European Solidarity Corps and we wanted to bring attention to it. So we thought of creating a recycling sculpture to inspire people to reuse and be more caring to our environment. Tereza, known for her creative vision, prepared an amazing base for the sculpture in the shape of a man. We also collected little things that might be useful for the statue, like caps form the bottles, coloured papers that we had from previous activities, packaging from sweets, foil and more. At the event, our guests could decorate the base however they felt like. At the end, we had our IntegrART man, full of random details and bright colours!
We also invited our guests to find out more about volunteering with our quiz and mindmap. They were quizzed about European Solidarity Corps, opportunities that you get from volunteering, different countries and more! WIth the mindmap, we all shared associations that we have with volunteering. On board you could find the words like adventure, inclusion, fun, personal development, new friends and more.
We also had an activity that we called treasure swap. During the festival guests were able to exchange cool random things with each other. Something that they didn’t need anymore could become what other was looking for, so we wanted to embrace sharing and giving things second life. Some things on the table included earrings, a pin, artbooks, face masks, mugs. It was really fun to see what people were bringing and how they were excited to pick something new for themselves.
And let’s not forget about the pictures! Before the event, we prepared big Instagram Frame with our logo to encourage everyone to take pictures during the festival. We proposed some party decorations to make photos more fun. The look was complete with the pins with our logotype and graphic of us, which was drawn by Avgoustis. It was the first experience for us with creating pins, but the result was great!
At the end we were happy how our first event turned out. We’re excited to see all the volunteers, students and guests who found time to come to #beIntegrART Festival. They made all the activities special and interesting. We can say that this event was a good start of our journey!
Take a look at the video made by Zoe about #beIntegrART Festival:
