Camp Village Bergheim 2 – KidZ & GenerationZ

CODE: IBG 12

Work:

Come and volunteer in a summer village for different (age) groups! 3 weeks of various activities await you while you assist in a summer camp for children and young families near Cologne! The summer village officially opens on the 13th of July and several weeks of program for children and teenagers have already happened when your camp starts. Your project starts with the arrival of a children group aged 7 to 12 (KidZ 4.-9.8.) and a week full of activities with and for the young participants. Your job will be to help with different types of workshops, where the children can try out different types of sport, creative activities, do arts and crafting or simply chill or play games. The second week (GenerationZ 11.-16.8.) is dedicated to families and presents a mix of generations from parents to small children and everything in between.

In the last days your job will be helping with the dismantling of the infrastructure, which gets stored away until the next year.
Aside from helping with the program, there will also be “backstage” tasks, such as taking shifts in the “bar” or cleaning the sanitary facilities. Another responsibility is the night duty: Since the participants are under-age, someone always needs to stay awake. Don’t worry, you won’t need to stay up the whole night and you won’t need to do it alone. It can easily turn into a nice long campfire-evening with friends. It is very important to the local team that you feel and become part of one big group of teamers.

Accomodation and food

You will sleep in big group tents on the camp village site. Camp mats will be provided, but please bring your own sleeping bag! There are showers and sanitary facilities available, but the accommodation itself is quite basic. There will be no need for cooking since you will be eating together with the local team and the participants, so everything will be provided, but of course it is expected that you may help with cleaning and so on. You can get a glimpse of the project area on the homepage of the association, where you can find pictures from the previous years: https://www.woanders.org/fotos/

Location and leisure

The camp village is situated on a meadow surrounded by trees a bit outside of the town of Bergheim. In Bergheim, you can find different shops and cafés, and Bergheim itself is only 20km away from Cologne. On your days off you can therefore visit Cologne, which is the fourth most populous city of Germany, famous for its cathedral and the Roman-Germanic museum. You can also go on trips to other nearby towns, for example to Bonn.

Project hosted by

Woanders e.V. is a non-profit organization which wants to reach people of all ages, support cross-generational interaction and contact between people from different areas of life. Their work intends to reduce fear of contact and support tolerance and curiosity for other people, by strengthening the team-spirit “We”. Each summer for over a
month, they organize a camping village full of activities for different age groups: This workcamp starts with a week of camping for children (07-12 years old), which is followed by a week for families.The last week of the project is dedicated to dismantling the whole area, because the summer is ending.

(Before this workcamp the program started with another 3 weeks of divers program for children and teenagers. The first group of volunteers is staying until 3rd of August and will help in facilitating your arrival phase.)

You can find the camp village schedule here:
www.woanders.org/zeltstadt/

Participants usually stay there for a full week, most of them will stay overnight in tents
and have their meals there as well. It is a project aimed mostly towards children and teens with fewer opportunities but it is open to people from all backgrounds. Priority is given to participants from nearby communities. Since 2020 we successfully support this project with small groups of international volunteers and the local team is looking forward to meet new international friends. By volunteering in this project, you are contributing to a sustainable and inclusive community (UN SDG 11).

Directions to meeting point

You have to arrive in Paffendorf train station. Please check for connections from anywhere to Paffendorf www.bahn.com/en. From there it is only a 15 minute walk to the camp village. There will be someone waiting to accompany you.

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