Ecocompartimos and my first few weeks of volunteering

After all the introductions and first impressions, I think it’s time I write about what exactly I do here. The organization where I work is called Ecocompartimos and it’s basically a huge second-hand shop where you can literally find everything: books, kitchen equipment, hand-made things, clothes, furniture, pictures, and many more.

Ecocompartimos: the ground floor

The basement: furniture/storage

It works in a very great way: people can either donate (this happens mostly with books and clothes) or leave their items for sale. In case it is sold within the given timeframe, they get the half of the price; the other half goes to the organization to maintain our projects. Besides the shop, there are many activities going on: there is free legal and mediation service for families (or anyone) who needs it; then we have a “Charla Café” (informal roundtable discussion) organized each month - mostly for women, but basically anyone who is interested can join. We also have a project called “Banco del tiempo” where people can offer their skills and time for others and in return they can ask for the skills or help of others too. I think it’s a great initiative (I subscribed too :)), though it is not very active yet – I hope we can find a way to make it more popular. From October a professional artist will hold different workshops in the shop: we’ll have painting, mosaic and restoration of furniture, I’m curious about these too.

In the first few weeks, I mostly took the time to get to know the shop better and we started to work on easier things: we helped with sorting the clothes (which was actually great fun :)) and started doing a database of the books in the shop (as there are lots of them this seems like a never-ending story for now :)). I also helped Helena (our boss/mentor/guardian angel :)) in putting together a presentation in Spanish about the organization that she can present to companies in order to find some partners. And we held our first Charla Café (as the guy who’s normally facilitating it could not come this month): it was very hard as it was in Spanish, so we couldn’t really lead the conversation since it took a lot of effort to follow what everyone was saying. But overall it went well, the people who came gave a lot of good feedback and also some ideas, so next time we will definitely do better.

The clothes "department"

Decoration I made for the Charla Café

The room we decorated with Dilya for the café (it was a storage room before)

We are also starting an “international meeting” series next week to talk about intercultural differences, I’m really excited about it (as we’ll run it together with Dilya), and I hope many people will be interested. Later on we are planning to cooperate with elementary and high schools, to have different events for children and also to promote European opportunities for high school students. Helena has many ideas and luckily she’s also very open to our suggestions, so I think we will learn many things from her and we’ll be able to do our own projects too. I already told her that I’d like to organize a quilling workshop and she liked it, so now I only need to find a place where I can buy the materials and set a date for it. :)