News

  • We are looking for two creative and motivated people to do European Voluntary Service (EVS) at the international Loesje office in Berlin for 12 months. EVS is a project of the European Commission and it means you can live for free in Berlin, do society-committed work and enjoy life, if you are under 31. Regulations you can read below.

     

    Who is Loesje?

    Loesje is an idealistic organisation which aims for a creative society based on own initiative and active citizenship. The objective is to exchange ideas and opinions, to stimulate people to create their own ideas. Loesje mainly uses posters with short but strong texts (one-liners), which shine a different light on particular subjects. Our main activity is to create such posters, together with our members, as well as with people from other organisations. The posters are spread on the Internet, around the streets, in community centres, schools etc. The aims of the organisation are to spread black and white posters to colour life and to create possibilities, in which participants of Loesje activities can start and support progressive social initiatives.

    The project

    The project will start on the 1st of September 2012 and will last until the 31st of August 2013. It will be a great experience! At our office you will be working together with Rola (SE), Artur (PL) and interns from different countries, as well as many other active people of Loesje. The accommodation is arranged and for free, we have a cosy EVS flat where you will live together with the other EVS volunteer. You get money for food and pocket money, insurance, a German language course and a bike. The atmosphere at the office is informal and there is a lot of space to come up with your own ideas. A mentor, as a personal guide, will be present during your EVS year, although we encourage self-initiative, because an active attitude is essential for the work we do.

    Project description / tasks

    The actual work you'll do greatly depends on your own interests. Own initiative is highly valued. An incomplete overview of the possibilities:

    ·         be in contact with and support new & old members

    ·         support and organise international projects

    ·         organise international youth meetings

    ·         give creative text writing workshops

    ·         help to develop and update the Loesje website, Facebook and other social media

    ·         co-organise the yearly Loesje Summer Camp

    ·         organise or create exhibitions, workshops or other activities in our project room: Loesje's Imagination

    ·         graphic design (lay-out of flyers, posters and Loesje products, as books)

    ·         you could be also involved in PR, networking, technical development or fund raising

    How to apply?

    First read the regulations and selection criteria. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us. One advice, in case you know the people at the international Loesje office, pretend you don’t know them. What you write is very important to us and not what you believe that we know of you. It’s better to write more than to give too less information.

    Regulations

    ·         You are not allowed to be German

    ·         You should be between 18 and 30 years old (not yet 31 by the start of the EVS project)

    ·         You should be able to speak English well (preferably more languages)

    Selection criteria

    ·         A strong motivation clearly describing what you want to do

    ·         CV and Creative Vitae (what are your creative skills?)

    ·         Able to work independently and to develop own ideas

    ·         Experience inside Loesje

    ·         Experience in organising projects

    ·         Computer skills

    ·         Willingness to live with another EVS-er

    ·         We should believe you will fit in our team

    ·         The following skills are not a requisite, but could be a plus: driving license, German knowledge, experience in lay-out, PR, fund raising, web design, hard ware and soft ware, book keeping or knowledge on topics that could be interesting to Loesje

    ·         We prefer a geographical and gender mixed team, though personal qualities weigh higher

    Deadline for applying:

    The deadline for applying is the 4th of March 2012.

    We will inform you as soon as possible, if you are selected or not.

    You can send your application to evs@loesje.org

  •  
    “TODAY I AM NEITHER MAN NOR WOMAN / BUT A MAGIC FISH

    Call for partners of Training Course with Loesje FI and Loesje Armenia
    2nd -8th of May, 2012 in Armenia

    In every country and culture, gender matters. People are not able to live their personal liberties, as they are being limited in different ways by the norm for gender. Many of us follow the rules of the norm so that we will not be bullied or punished in other ways for being different or wanting something else. Many of us have accepted the norm, and are gladly going along with it, but have never been encouraged to listen to our own wishes. In different ages, we have usually different problems. For youth who are just beginning to find their identity and stand on their feet, it is hard to be different from what parents, friends and school tell them to be, and stand up to the people you are dependent on.

    With this training aimed at youth workers, we try to deal with the question of norm around gender, but also other norms, which are closely linked with gender. These other norms are class, sexuality or ethnicity. All of these other categories change the conditions for a person, not only gender. Therefore, if we want freedom and peace for all, we need to also take these other categories of oppression in consideration when we study the question of gender inequality. In this matter, we will take a closer look at the term “intersectionality”, a concept used more frequently by NGO's.

    Hopefully, the youth workers will hopefully pass the questioning of stereotypes and prejudices in their work. We will share knowledge from our different situations and backgrounds. The norms are different in different regions. How is the norm around gender displayed specifically in our countries? What messages are youth getting from us and rest of society? We will try different method books that have been developed around gender, such as those in the Compass and methods directly connected with gender from an intersectional point of view. We will also take a very close look at ourselves. What actually are our opinions? What other opinions are there? How do we ourselves sustain or break the norm?

    The objectives of the project are: - To understand the concept gender, how it is related to other norms such as age, class and ethnicity, - to learn concrete methods and tools for questioning norms, - to encourage people to stand for their rights, - to share experiences around the subject between European and Partner countries, - to promote Loesje methods,


    Content

    The training will contain the following workshops:

    Norm-breaking workshops:
    • What does the norm around gender look like? How does it affect us personally? And how do we think it affects the youth we work with? How can gender be related to other oppressions, like if you are a woman in a certain age, class, skin colour or ethnicity and so on? We will use methods with intersectionality perspective and that also deals with power theory. In this section we are going to go through different method books

    Questions for participants to discuss that will be given before and during the training:
    • What are the laws and statistics in our countries, compared with the charter of Human Rights? What do we encounter as youth leaders, when it comes to gender inequality? How should we change our methods when we work with youth? Through different interactive exercises we will try to answer these questions. We will collect the results and share it with each other after the training.

    Loesje Creative Text-writing:
    • One day of text-writing sessions to create posters around gender.

    Team-building:
    • Ice Breaking and get to know each other
    • Energisers
    • Tour in local area.
    • Evening activity

    Practical details

    Finances: The participants will have to pay 30% of their travelling costs, and insurance. Everything else will be provided by the project.

    Duration: 6 days including arrival and departure day

    Time of Training Course2nd -8th of May

    Partners

    Programme Countries: (EU member states + Iceland Liechtenstein Norway Switzerland, Croatia, Turkey )

    EECA: (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova)

    MEDA: ( Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Palestinian Authority of the
    West Bank and Gaza Strip)



    Participants: 24 youth workers.

    Location: Dilijan, Armenia

    Preliminary Agreement

    If you find the project interesting for your organisation, then please send in the attached Preliminary Agreement signed and scanned to safaa@loesje.org at the latest on the 30th of January. And also the original by post to:

    Loesje International
    P.O. Box 910138
    12413 Berlin - Germany


    Thank you!
    Safaa Daoud, Loesje SE (Sweden) and Loesje FI (Finland), Project manager
    Number: +49-30-97882577      

    Hranush Shahnazaryan, head of Loesje Armenia
    Mail: hranush.shahnazaryan@gmail.com
    Number: +374 55 469909
  • On Sunday, the 15 th of January, 3000 people went out to the streets of Berlin not because the sun was shining but to protest for global change and a better world. Loesje and friends joined the movement Occupy Berlin which walked from the Roten Rathaus to close the Bundestag. 

      

    Unfortunately, police barriers prevented the demonstration to reach its final goal which was Platz der Republik. Nevertheless, the demonstrators didn't lose their motivation and stayed put listening to speeches given out by people that went up to the open microphones. Among them was Professor Angela Davis from Occupy New York, USA.

    This demonstration showed that the Occupy Berlin movement is not demotivated by the peaceful eviction of their Camp on the 9th of January and news about more actions taking place in May are starting to be circled around by the organizers.

     

    Many other demonstrations took place in the rest of Germany and worlwide. For more information about the Occupy movement, follow this link: www.occupytogether.org

  • Photo by Juliana Zapata for CIVIS from http://www.intersektionalitet.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_0507.jpg

    During 29th-30th of November Safaa Daoud and Carola Ståhl at the international Loesje office attended a conference arranged by the peace organisation CIVIS in Gothenburg to discuss the concept “Intersectionality” and how it can be used by organisations that work with subjects such as gender equality, anti-racism, diverse sexualities and other categories that could be a target of oppressive norms. The organisation for the Swedish united anti-discrimination bureau lists seven categories that they focus on. They are religion, sex, gender, functionality, ethnicity, age and sexuality.

    Intersectionality is a term that was coined by scholars, from  the black working class feminist movement in the US. They were questioning the kind of feminism that was predominant then, which they thought only advocated for the rights of white middle class women. They believed that in general, we cannot only deal with one struggle against oppression within one norm. They rather saw that all predominant norms were intersected. All the norms enforce each other and are in need of each other to exist. Here is some easy reading about the term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality_theory#

    A very interesting example that was given in one of the lectures by Paulina de los Reyes, one of the most distinguished scholars within intersectional research in Sweden, was the “Millionsvenska” or “Förortsvenska”. It is a name for the kind of Swedish that was created in the suburbs of the big cities of Sweden. The creators and speakers of this dialect are mainly young men and women, referred to as immigrants and un-educated youngsters coming from socioeconomically poor families. In other words, all bundled into the category, “ troublesome young immigrants from the suburb”. Millionsvenskan was picked up by a magazine called Gringo, which was dealing with issues of racism and sexism. A huge debate was started, about what kind of Swedish is correct Swedish. There were advocates for the ‘correct’ kind of Swedish, saying that promoting the ‘wrong’ kind of Swedish will only keep the people living in the suburbs to “selling bananas”. And that the language was sexist. The reply came from advocates of the Millionsvenska that the language was in fact inclusive of women, but that picture didn’t fit the prejudice of young men from the suburb. A female journalist also replied that apparently the ‘correct Swedish’ advocators weren’t aware that women like her who are speaking “Millionsvenska”, happen to be ‘successful’. Conclusively, through an intersectional analysis, one can see that the advocators of the ‘correct Swedish’ weren’t only confirming prejudice of men with migration background in the suburbs being more sexist than white middle class men, thus assuming that women in the suburbs automatically are more oppressed. In a class-based society, it is implied that selling bananas in a market is a “failure”.  This example shows how a problem usually is multi-layered, and how categories could intersect. Noteworthy to this example is that Kiezdeutsch, the German equivalent of Millionsvenska, is today classified as a dialect.

    At the conference, we dealt with questions of how we could implement an intersectional thinking into our work. We at Loesje believe that this term could be useful in our network. Many organisations expressed that they were already working in an intersectional matter, without knowing that there was a term for it. And this is how it feels a little bit with Loesje. The posters are dealing with so many different themes. The texts are questioning different oppressive norms and wants everybody’s freedom, no matter which categories people are forced into. We would like to go further with this perspective, and consciously implement it, not only in the posters, but in other projects we are involved in.

    Now Loesje International has been asked to participate in yet another project from the organisation CIVIS that initiated the conference, where we would be part of a long term web-based  training in intersectionality, this together with other organisations in Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina respectively. To know more about CIVIS project about the subject, you can visit the website here http://www.intersektionalitet.org/and get an English version.

    Safaa

  • On Sturday, December 3, Warsaw welcomed the first Loesje's mural in Poland. The Polish version of the poster "The longer you wait for the future the shorter it will be" was (legally) painted on a wall in Warsaw's Praga Polnoc district, on 38 Stalowa St. As the size matters, the mural is about 4,5 meter wide and about 6 meter high.

    pic by Jarosław Żeliński

    pic by Jarosław Żeliński

    pic by Jarosław Żeliński

    Pictures by Jarosław Żeliński

  • Last Wednesday, Loesje’s Berlin office was invited as representing a European Volunteer Service receiving organization by the Jugend in Aktion at a day aimed to promote volunteering.

    The day was arranged by the German ministry for family affairs. Safaa, Artur and Rola were there to tell about a volunteer’s role at the Berlin office. We gave two speed writing workshops and recommend EVS to some interested people.

    We also had the opportunity to meet the people that work at Jugend in Aktion who are behind many approved Loesje project applications, and had a nice chat with them.

  • After a hard selection process, 25 participants from more than 20 countries have been chosen from 270 applicants to join the Study Session at the European Youth Centre Budapest 21st to 27th of November 2011. Loesje International, Loesje Armenia, Loesje Egypt, Loesje Macedonia and Cazalla International from Spain are welcoming all of them and looking forward to working together soon!

    Study Session "Why not exchange prejudices for experiences"

    Aim:

    The Study Session aims to empower youth leaders to work with young people helping them overcome their stereotypes and learn to live in diverse and multicultural societies, to respect human rights, by using creative tools including those of Loesje.

     

    Objectives:

    Ø  To become aware and understand the concepts of human rights, diversity, prejudices and stereotypes

    Ø  To explore how the prejudices and stereotypes manifest in the countries of participants.

    Ø  To share the experiences of the participants in using creative tools for activism in their communities

    Ø  To allow participants to reflect upon their position regarding human rights, diversity, prejudices and stereotypes

    Ø  To develop the necessary competencies in order to implement the follow up initiatives in their communities and on international level.   

  • Loesje International
    in cooperation with
    the Directorate of Youth and Sport
    of the Council of Europe

    European Youth Center Budapest

    21st-27th of November, 2011

     

    Loesje Internationaland Loesje Armenia in cooperation with the Directorate of Youth and Sport of the Council of Europe announce this call for participants for the study Session “Why do not change prejudices into experiences” taking place 21-27 November 2011 (including arrival and departure days) at European Youth Center Budapest.

    Loesje is an international freedom of speech organization. Its charter is to spread creativity, positive criticism, ideas, philosophical ponderings and thoughts on current events by way of short slogans on posters, signed by the Dutch girl ‘Loesje’.Since the beginning of 1990’s and even more since 2003 Loesje International has initiated and organized a large number of international youth exchanges, trainings, Summer Camps and seminars relating to many different themes, including freedom of speech, diversity and Human Rights to solve problems and empower youth. We have already realized many international gatherings bringing together diverse groups of participants, working on creating a joint product and a multiplier effect outlasting the project itself.

     

    Aims ando bjectives

    The training course aims to create creative tools and to empower youth leaders to work with young people helping them to undo their stereotypes and learn how to live in diverse and multicultural societies.

     

    Objectives:

    • To become aware and understand the concepts of respect, and
      appreciation for cultural diversity,

    • To explore the topic of prejudices and stereotypes and how it
      looks like in the different participating countries,

    • To create creative tools to work on the topic of prejudices and stereotypes,

    • To reflect upon participants’ own position on the topic of  
      stereotypes and cultural diversity,

    •  To develop the necessary skills in order to implement the follow up initiatives and to continue work in the area of international youth exchanges of young people

     

    Facilitators:

    • Carola Ståhl, Loesje International

    • Evan Sedgwick-Jell, Loesje International

    • Agnieszka Byrczek, Cazalla Intercultural

    • Hussein ElShafei, project manager of the Alexandria Cancer Research Cluster in Egypt & founder Loesje Egypt

    • Hranush Shahnazaryan, Course Director, head of Loesje Armenia

     

    Profile of the participants

    • Active member of youth organizations (volunteers or employees) working with international projects

    • Interested in Loesje creative methods and ready to promote Council of Europe’s  values

    • Between 18 and 30 years old

    • Able to work in English

    • Committed to participate actively in the full duration of the study session

    • Committed to contribute to the follow-up activity

    • Be a national or resident of one of the member states of the Council of Europe.   

     

    Application,procedure and selection of participants

    The application form must be sent to armenia@loesje.org. The deadline is 01.10.2011. The preparatory team will select thirty participants on the basis of the profile outlined above. It will try as far as possible to respect the organizations’ priorities, but also to ensure a balance between sexes, geographical regions, different types of experiences, cultural backgrounds and organizations, institutions and projects.  A waiting list may be established. Candidates will be informed whether their application has been accepted, rejected, or if they have been put on the waiting list, by 1ts October 2011.

     

    Financial and practical conditions of participation

    Travel expenses

    Travel expenses and visa fees for the Study Session in Budapest are reimbursed according to the rules of the Council of Europe. Only the participants who attend the entire training course can be reimbursed. The payment will be made in cash during the study session or by bank transfer after the study session.

    Accommodation

    Board  and lodging  for  the residential  training  seminar will  be  provided  and  paid for by  the Council of Europe.

    Enrolment fee

    An enrolment fee of 50 Euros is payable by each participant. This amount will be deducted from the amount to be reimbursed for travel expenses or paid at the EYCB during the residential seminar.

    Working languages

    English will the working language of the Study Session.

     

    If you have questions related with study session, feel free to contact us by armenia@loesje.org

     

    APPLICATION FORM DOWNLOAD

     

    Course Director,
    Hranush Shahnazaryan

    --
    Online portfolio: hranush.blogspot.com

  • Last month, there was a text writing workshop done in Malmö Sweden. "Watch it" works to stimulate creative and political activity amongst youth in Malmö and Lund, Sweden. The results were published on their web site http://watchitmalmolund.se/2011/05/25/stryk-mig-medhars-jag-kanner-mig-motstravig-loesje/

  • If you are planning your summer holiday, don't forget about the Loesje Summer Camp in Estonia from 22nd July til 02nd August 2011.

     

    A lot of people registered already from the Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Germany: Miranda, Clara, Artur, Meindert, Esther, Pascal, Lotte, Anara, Susanne, Kristin, Ganna, Oleg, Luder, Kateryna and Jonathan.

    Don't hesitate anymore, Loesje is a guarantee for fun!

    Please fill out the registration form and plan your journey to the marvelous Estonia.

    Looking forward to have an inspiring camp with you!

    Loesje and her international crew