My Changemaker Tour in Northern Europe 🎙| Season 2 @mediajaag

I wanted so bad to see this sustainable floating village called Schoonschip (105 inhabitants, 46 houseolds, 30 floating plots, 500 solar panels...) from my own eyes. Meeting for 2 hours in the North of Amsterdam its co-founder Marjan De Blok who has worked on this project for 12 years of her life in partnership especially with the inhabitants was incredible. I even had the chance to visit her floating house. As a television producer, Marjan De Blok started from scratch in 2008 when she first started to work on what will become the most sustainable floating village in Europe twelve years later, in January 2020. She shows us how we can accomplish huge things with passion and dedication.

Rajiv Raj Jagasia is a real changemaker with great values trying to tackle the problem of textile pollution. He took 3 years to think about his concept : KLOTHBERG. With his wife by his side as co-founder, they’re working with ethical factories in India to make happen the ideas of their community of fashion ethical designers and bring conscious and ecological friendly products to wholesale business platform.

Kolja Kugler is the kind of artist you don’t often meet in your life. With its robot band, the One love Machine Band, made entirely from his own hands using scrap metals found in scrapyard, he performs music shows all over the world and proves to us how imagination and creativity is an endless world that can really help as well the planet. Meeting him on the Wild Waste Gallery site, a super creative alternative place in Prenzlauer Berg, where he is working with other groups of artists, opened my eyes to a parallel and magical world where imagination reigns, like a feeling of coming back to childhood.

Luise Beier is the co-founder of the Breakout Café, it’s a social café trying to have an impact on its local community in Kreuzberg, in Berlin. It offers a first job opportunity for young people and refugees. But more than that, it tries to give them confidence, a passion, a reason to grow in their daily life.

In Berlin, i met Simon Thies. He is part of the management team of Green City Solutions, the initiators of the City Tree. We talked for one hour about his story and this innovation that cleans air in urban cities in combination of engineering, irrigation, moss and IOT.

A new place of worship called House Of One in Berlin will allow people of different faith to pray side by side in about 4 years. This interreligious project founded by Christians, Muslims and Jewish aims to build a building that will be at the same time a synagogue, a church and a mosquee. I had the chance to talk with representatives of the 3 communities involved in this unique project : Frithjof Timm, for the Christian Community, Esther Hirsch, for the Jewish Community and Osman Örs for the Muslim Community. They told me about their wish to bring people together into dialogue.

Luise and Anny are two inspiring and passionate young womens. With their movement, the Mindful Movement, they’re trying to help people finding out their true potential and creating meaningful lives and work through mindfulness, self-discovery and social entrepreneurship education.

In Copenhagen, i met Peter Just, the founder and CEO of Hubbster, in his offices near Christiana. With his team and his partners in the world, he wants to tackle the problem of the "connected loneliness", it means that people can be physically isolated due to the spread of digital technology. As a solution, Hubbster tries to connect people of all ages, and develop their creativity, in public spaces thanks to connected little boxes or "hubs" full of 20 different games (like Petanque, Ping Pong, Beach Volley, Street Basketball, Football, Pole Tennis, Kubb, or Möllky). Our talk was really inspiring, we talked about the real problem here to solve, how does Hubbster work in detail but also how did they overcome the difficulties, how will they adapt their concept elsewhere and even the impact of Bryant Park, in NYC, as an inspiration.

The Human Library or « Menneskebiblioteket » is an international organization and movement created in Copenhagen in 2000 by Ronni Abergel and his brother Dany and colleagues Asma Mouna and Christoffer Erichsen. This concept is about offering people as books, a sort of human books. Books have titles that aim to represent a stigmatized or stereotyped group of people in the community. As Camilla Ibsen, the national events coordinator in Denmark for the Human Library told me, adults, students can chat, during private or public events, for the first time with people they would never have met in their daily lives.