Black sheep has started rolling

YES, finally our new campaign in Active has had it's first activity. This weekend (10th - 14th June) we had the first Black sheep seminar!
8 people from 8 different European countries came in the Active office in Örebro on thursday. Some of them made it on time, others missed some trains, but at the end of the day everyone was happy to be here and to talk with the old Active friends.

The seminar started on friday where we had a guest lecturer - Helena Wannberg to tell us something about Alcohol in families.

After that Maik Duennbier had the rest of the day to talk about the Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention of the Right of the Child and it's connection to alcohol issues.





Since we had a hard working day, we went to the famous Active restorant - Karishma and had a nice and spicy dinner, that was followed by a long talking walk for some people and watching a football match infront of the TV for others.


The next day was very interesting. We had our sessions together with 30 people from UNF, so we got a lot of information about their project FAKE FREE and talked a lot about the impression of alcohol, people's expectations and reactions about it. In the afternoon we had a nice walk in the town with the intention to notice how big is the media influence of alcohol around us, and the conclusion was that only for a 15 min walk, we had a lot of materials.
The rest of the day was covered by our guest lecturers Linnea Forsberg, talking about the project "Skåll for barnen" and Anja Karinsdotter, presenting the project "Vit Jul". A variety of ideas were flowing in our heads, so we decided, in order to keep the creativity alive and the energy visable, we will have Olympic games in the evening. =)
Me and Anja were leading the "show" and we divided all participants, considering the place they come from, in 5 groups from 5 different regions in the world (Europe 1, Europe 2, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Sweden). They all had to invent a game that will present their region, so we had 5 teams that were competing in playng 5 different games. It was very exciting, the team spirit was all around, we were surrounded by a lot of energy and weird looks from the people that were passing by us. But we didn't care, we had fun!
I can only say that night was looooong, especially for the domino players who ended their game around 03:30h in the morning.

Just like that, the last working day had come. On the agenda we had to do a lot of work focused only on our Black sheep activities in future, but we had to add some more materials, so we worked, and talked, and planed, but it wasn't enough. We had lunch on the roof of our building, and than again, discussions and ideas all around, but nope, still not enough. We had dinner out in a nice restorant that we couldn't decide if it was greek or turkish... untill at the end the people that worked there told us it was 60% turkish and 40% greek.. =) So after the dinner and a lot of laughs, jokes and information about the incredibly smart boy Marco from Macedonia, we ended up in the office again, where we worked untill 00:00h. Yes, it was midnight, and we still had the laptops opened, trying to get the google wave right, a lot of creative names and slogans were written all around the white board, while others were trying to make some pictures on the wall, from the light of the projektor. It looked something like this...

But that is all part of our connection to Active. Eventhough we were exhausted at the end, we stayed until the morning, talking, watching movies, laughing and saying "Good bye and see you soon in Norway". It was a weekend to remember. Seing the motivation of this great group of people to work together, to make some change for the world they live in was amazing. I can't wait to go to our next meeting in Norway and to follow every activity that will be organised under the name of Black sheep campaign! =)

Sanja