Green Café: ‘ Sustainable Eindhoven - are you in? - Retrospective
Saturday March 4th, the Groen Cafe together with People for Planet, Wild Eindhoven and Eindje Groen hosted an open call to the international or English speaking community in the Eindhoven region to meet and share their needs and desires around sustainability. The aim was to start creating a new sustainable program for the city's international community. It was a successful event that gathered 22 participants (Dutch and internationals) who contributed with interesting ideas, inspiration and enthusiasm.
It started with short welcoming words given by Giedre Liutkeviciute (People for Planet), the moderator, who clearly explained the agenda and objectives of the event. After that, Giedre led an interactive activity to get to know the group and the participants' sustainability preferences and motivations. This activity was followed up by the presentation of the four host organizations which shared their intentions and activities as a way to inspire participants with new ideas and possibilities. In this respect, Judith Leijssen from TGE talked about the mission of TGE and the intentions of de Groen Cafe to involve internationals of the region.
Participants then worked in teams where they could express their motivations to be present, the sustainability oriented activities they have followed in Eindhoven or elsewhere, the activities that they miss in the city and the events they would like to have. Within these teams, participants brainstormed and selected the best 3 ideas that represented the preferences of their team. These were presented to the rest of the audience in a plenary session led by Nuno Curado (Wild Eindhoven) where all participants discussed them and voted for the best three. These top 3 ideas/suggestions were:
- the participants are interested on meeting frequently (once or twice a month),
- they would like to join activities around the topic "sustainable food" (producing, sourcing, cooking and sharing food);
- and they would like to create and have a virtual platform in English about relevant sustainability topics such as the local green policy, the location of recycling places, the environmental footprint of daily decisions, etc.
Additional ideas were also gathered such as organizing workshops where people can repair their bikes or swap clothes, etc.
The event ended at a local cafe where participants and organizers had some drinks together.
The information collected during this event will be processed in the coming days to start creating a nice program of activities.