Daria Mazina, Anoushka Orquin, Lola Gonzalez & Aoife Curran
Momentum hosted a celebration for International Women’s Day on March 8th with an afternoon tea and chat about wellbeing with youth in our communities. Inclusion EU Project Specialist, Lola Gonzalez, organized this event with the help from EU Project Specialist Samantha Carty and intern Aoife Curran. Young ladies from different nationalities who live in Leitrim were invited.
We had two of our guests speak to the audience. Daria Mazina, a young Ukrainian refugee, spoke about her volunteer work with Carrick-on-Shannon Tidy Towns for the past months. She shared how volunteering has been good for her integration into the community. She also gives her time as a translator to Leitrim County Council and to the Community Car Scheme when transporting Ukrainians to medical appointments. She feels this has helped her wellbeing during her transition into a new country. Anoushka Orquin spoke about her work as a video editor and gave a few tips to guests at the event. She works with Apple but in her spare time creates brilliant content related to pop culture on her youtube channel. These activities have helped her remain healthy and grounded in the new county which became home during Covid times.
Samantha Carty, Aoife Curran & Lola Gonzalez
All attendees heard about project Wellhoody from Lola Gonzalez who is Momentum’s Inclusion and EU Project Specialist. The Good Practices Guide was completed last year. This is a guide that researches, collects, and presents 20 good practices of youth participation in diverse communities that have significant positive outcomes for inclusion and wellbeing. Our Open Education Resources will encourage community and youth educators to take responsibility for the wellbeing of young people and promote the strengths that being part of a diverse community bring. The Wellhoody Clubs will ensure that we respond to key headline EU challenges through a unique, engaging, modern, and participatory method, using in-person and online networking as a basis for embedding youth in wellbeing.
We look forward to inviting youth in our communities to join in participation starting this summer. We cannot forget our Wellhoody Platform and Online Course which will be an interactive learning digital platform. We see the course as able to facilitate collaboration, promote peer-to-peer learning, and encourage cross-project fertilization of ideas to accelerate learning.
Overall, it was a very successful event. There was great conversation around our Wellhoody resources of which our guide is now online. We look forward to developing this project further during the rest of the year. We have a brilliant team from different European countries which include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Ireland, France, Germany, and Sweden. Our goal is to build healthy youth communities which recognize the strengths that come from diversity and help them to welcome everyone.
