EDEN CENTER: E-Volunteering as a way for a healthy life and environment!

The emergency situation that the whole world is facing at the moment due to the new Corona Virus COVID – 19 is very difficult for everyone. It looks like the year has stopped and everything needs to be postponed till a non-yet-decided period. Everyone is staying home, starting from children to state leaders.

However, when it comes to the activism of civil society, especially environmental activism, there is no time to waste! This is exactly what young activists of EDEN centre in Albania are doing since the quarantine period started.

At the beginning of the first week of quarantine, they decided together to organize their weekly volunteer meetings online, meetings they usually had every Saturday afternoon all together at EDEN’s office. The attendance was maximal as always and everyone had their creative and interesting ideas on how they could use this time for E-volunteering.

They started brainstorming and each of the volunteers made their own suggestions for things they could publish on EDEN’s social media to make their followers spend their time in a productive way and in the same time to keep raising awareness on environmental protection and climate change.

On Monday, volunteers posted their recommendations of books, films, and environmental-themed documentaries. On the following day was presented the small wooden ecological house of EDEN Center located at Tirana Zoo Park, as one of its kind in Albania used for children’s environmental education.

They continued posting everyday information about their big family, every volunteer profile and then their small working groups, inviting every interested youngster to join the team.

We discovered that this was the perfect time for virtual activity as the feedback was great. Around 1300 new people accessed the posts on social media and around 15 new youngsters joined the group of volunteers, only in the first week of our virtual activity.

On Friday, EDEN together with Fridays For Future Albania joined the Greta Thunberg’s initiative for publishing banners, memes, quotes, etc. about climate change under the hashtags #DigitalStrike and #ClimateStrikeOnline.

EDEN didn’t keep its activism only on social media, but the team also met each other with several experts who kindly presented different environmental topics, informing and inspiring.

It was a wonderful week that proved to the group that nothing can stop real activism and now they already have prepared the calendar for the upcoming weeks.

This time the group will focus on the effects that Coronavirus is causing to Human Behavior and how these behaviours are affecting the environment, specifying the effects of air and water pollution, littering, panic buying, globalism and utilitarianism. For the first time, the volunteers will also have joined meeting with other youth organizations to share experiences and present all these environmental topics to as many youngsters as possible.

Beside everything, they are excited to what they are doing. E-volunteering keeps them engaged and psychologically healthy.

EDEN volunteers have a message for every youngster of YEE member organizations: Take care, Stay Healthy and keep fighting for a sustainable environment through E-volunteering. This too shall pass!