On 17th of  November 2016 in cooperation with Tamjdem, YEE organised a volunteering day in the eco-center Toulcův dvůr (Prague). This event is already a tradition in YEE and this year it was organised in the frame of the campaign “Change Climate Change”.

Tamjdem is a non-profit NGO, which organises volunteer weekends, volunteer days as well as workcamps with different NGOs around the Czech Republic in order to promote volunteering and the values that go with it, help non-profit organisations and enable people, who are interested in volunteering, to meet each other. It is also possible to go abroad for workcamps with help of Tamjdem.

12 volunteers from different countries including the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Peru, Ukraine and Russia came to help in Toulcův dvůr this year. We played some ice-breaking games before the working day started and judging from the way we successfully sorted out with one really “tangled” game, our team was ready for any difficult task :)

According to the season, we were suggested to help with grabbing leaves and digging a small field in order to plant a garden for butterflies in spring. Also we were asked to help with leading horses to the meadows: we had to go through slushy way, ankle-deep in the mud sometimes, but everybody was excited about communication with the beautiful and smart animals so much, that nobody actually noticed that inconveniences. We were lucky enough to catch the best weather to work outside +10 C and no rain, so outgoing conditions encouraged us to spend this day out productively.

To cheer up volunteers and also get to know each other better a coffee-break had been arranged before lunch. During the break, volunteers had a chance to measure their carbon footprint with a game “How big is your elephant?” - this action is also related to YEE ongoing Change Climate Change campaign, you can discover more about it here. Volunteers, taking part in measurement, learned more about sustainable level of footprint and compared their impact with the average level among European countries. We are happy to mention that participants found it very interesting, everyone was concerned about their impact and they discussed possible ways to decrease it.

Then we went to work and some of us changed their positions to try every sort of suggested tasks. Our working day had been interrupted with early November twilight and at 16:00 we finished with helping to make fund raising movie for Tamjdem.

It was only workday end, but not the end of our volunteer day. After dark we had a bonfire, and some of us had a chance to gain new skills while trying to set it on. We baked potato and apples under ashes, had a small competition for the best recipe of baked hermelin and shared our impressions about this day. In the end, tired but satisfied, we went home with confidence that another volunteer day in Toulcův dvůr was successfully completed.