Concordia Post Season Event 2008 - 24th-26th October report

Now I know I say this every year but I honestly believe that this years Post Season Event was the best yet! We had around 25 volunteers join us in sunny Whitehawk for a weekend of information sharing, volunteering, games, food and fun. At every Post Season Event we spend Saturday either volunteering or undertaking global education activities. This year we were particularly keen to volunteer as the weekend coincided with CSV’s (Community Service Volunteers) Make a Difference Day - a nationwide initiative to encourage volunteering and Saturday 25^th October was the biggest annual day of volunteering in the UK.

Our contribution to Make a Difference Day was volunteering at one of our new UK projects, Stanmer Organics. Stanmer Organics is a co-operative of individuals and groups based at an 8 hectare site at Stanmer Park in Brighton. They are committed to using the land for organic food production which is sold locally with the aim of reducing road travel & air pollution and being sustainable.

Our first stop was at an apple orchard where we collected apples and pressed them using a traditional hand operated apple press that made a surprisingly large amount of delicious apple juice - several buckets full in fact!

Also based in Stanmer Park is the Earthship a pioneer project in sustainable building techniques. “The Earthship is the most sustainable facility available in England with all electricity and water flowing freely from nature” (Low carbon website).

Mischa Hewitt who was greatly involved in the design and building of the Earthship joined our group and very kindly gave us a very interesting and honest tour and talk on the design of the Earthship, and sustainable buildings. Thank you to Mischa for taking time out from his busy weekend to join us. For more information on Earthships check out www.lowcarbon.co.uk

No post season event would be complete without some get-your-hands-dirty volunteering, so once we had been shown around the Earthship we assisted John and Ben on their allotment planting trees and picking vegetables. The trees were an evergreen hedging plant Elaeagnus ebingeii which make a superb windbreak and also have edible berries and were part paid for by Concordia thanks to the money that Chloe won for us.

Needless to say we went out on Saturday night and painted the town red… well actually we painted it white as Brighton had a number of free events running to celebrate White Night – the night the clocks change. There was free access to the Pavilion, a variety of street performances to enjoy and of course more pubs per square mile than anywhere else in the UK!

On Sunday we ran a global education session on Millennium Development Goals that were created by world leaders in 2000 and aim to reduce global poverty by 2015. Many of the targets look unlikely to be met and we joined the Oxfam led campaign “In My Name” to pressurise world leaders into doing more. For more information go to www.whitebandaction.org

All in all we had a fantastic weekend and it was great to catch up with some old faces and meet some new volunteers. Every year the post season event gets bigger and better and we can’t wait for next year so we can do it all over again! We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who contributed to making it such a success and so much fun.

Concordia Team

Click here to see more pictures from the post season event.

Click here to see the pictures for the "In my name campaign"