Emic Foundation, Toruń, Poland
Academic Centre for Culture and Arts "Od Nowa", Toruń, Poland
Poland is seeing an increase in nationalistic attitudes and hostility towards foreigners. We would like to counteract those trends by showing our sensitivity, curiosity and hospitality towards different cultures that call Poland home. For three years now we have been organizing Travel Meetings in Toruń and they have been getting increasingly popular. The key element of each meeting is a lecture by an invited guest from another country, who is currently living in Poland and is willing to tell the audience about their homeland. We believe that we can counteract stereotypes pertaining to other cultures, hear a “first hand” account on life in a different part of the world, and develop some “travelers” sensitivity, or step outside a typical European tourist perspective.
We will organize an event with an engagement of the citizens of Toruń and our partner organizations. We will conduct workshops entitled “Let’s Get to Know Each Other” about multi-culturalism and immigration for the Polish and immigrant youth, and their families. Our partner, Emic Foundation, will support us in conducting theater and educational workshops and in creating a short orientation film for other institutions that would like to organize similar events. With another partner, the Academic Culture and Arts Center “Od Nowa,” we will organize the National Immigrant Poetry Slam entitled “Babel,” during which both immigrants and Polish citizens will share their poetry composed in English. We will organize a series of meetings about the country of Georgia, Morocco, and Columbia during which citizens of these countries will talk about their cultures, cuisines, and traditions. We will cook together some of their traditional dishes. Together with our third partner, Dwór Artusa Culture Center in Toruń, we will host the third edition of the Worldview Festival. The festival will host lectures on Georgia, Morocco, and Columbia, as well as arts classes and a traditional Georgian music concert.
