It is difficult to put 2020 into words. It has been surprising, challenging, enlightening, limiting, creative, and sometimes just plain lonel. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have given us both highs and lows.
The world got lit with passion to support the Black Lives Matter movement - and so did we!
Despite the pandemic, we had many milestones this year:
We concluded our final photoshoot of Roots Guide of nearly four years. Rehab attended meetings with Dutch Culture, Prince Claus Foundation, NOOR and World Press Photo in Amsterdam to develop partnerships for Roots Guide, seek publishing advice and strengthen connections between Roots Guide and the photography scene in the Netherlands. We’ve had great feedback from professional advisors on our approach and the progress of our plan. While Ingi was in London to present Roots Guide to staff of the European headquarters of Disney and National Geographic, as well as getting training from MediaFirst, Google, Twitter, and Facebook on how to better promote Roots Guide at their respective headquarters in London. And we were able to host one(!) team dinner before social distancing became the new reality.
When the lockdown became a reality, we decided to postpone and cancel storytelling workshops and events until we could better understand how the pandemic would play out. As the lockdowns descended upon us the team and community started to connect online through newly created virtual wellbeing and storytelling sessions. Activities such as poetry and story sharing, dancing, trivia to test our knowledge about the Netherlands and the world, fun online games, drawing and meditation brought us closer to each other. Like last year, students from
Wageningen University conducted a consultancy project for Roots Guide – entirely online. This year’s consultancy team looked at different organisations with social inclusion goals in Utrecht to identify what knowledge gaps exist or which tools they are missing which helped us to better understand how Roots Guide can add a collaborative value to social inclusion in the Netherlands. Despite, or perhaps because of the pandemic, our team grew with Amber, Fiona, Mesh, Sarah, Alejandra, and Abel. Many of us have not in person, yet the online tools have helped us stay connected with support from Haella Stichting and in-kind support from Slack and Google. We also secured a partnership with Masterclass.
The world got lit with passion to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Roots Guide shares stories of Black lives in the Netherlands, and one of them is from our guide, Jennifer Tosch. She spoke at the Amsterdam demonstration and reminded us that “there’s no reason to congratulate ourselves because we're doing better here in Europe than in the US. Racism is often seen as an ‘American problem’, because we in Europe believe we’re colour blind! We still have so much work to do. We need to provide historical context to racism so that we can understand how it is a part of a global system”. We wholeheartedly support Jennifer’s work and you can re-discover Amsterdam’s hidden stories with her Black Heritage Tours in Amsterdam. We highly recommend her tours!
We are very grateful to finish our last photoshoot for Roots Guide before lock-down. All interviews could be finalised online.
After four years of co-creating and documenting diverse migration stories from across the Netherlands, our first prototype was ready for beta-testing. This research is supported by National Geographic Society.
Finalising our stories of Roots Guide has taken us longer than planned and National Geographic Society gave us a one year extension, which has been particularly helpful during the pandemic. We are also proud that we finally got our first prototype out to our beta-testers. A group of more than 15 people from all around the Netherlands have read and given feedback on the prototype to help make the guidebook as user-friendly and relevant as possible to our future readers. The research - led by Meghann and Ingi - include reading the stories, visiting the places, and getting to see the Netherlands in ways they’ve never done before through our reflection questions and travel activities. We’ll be getting their user feedback by mid-January 2021, and Rehab, Daan, Meghann and Ingi will launch into the next round of edits and adjustments. The initial feedback very promising and provides helpful insights to improve our final guidebook. The stories have deeply moved our readers already! And we can finally concretely prepare our marketing and communication strategies for 2021 led by our new communication and marketing team with Anne, Amber, Sarah, Fiona, Razan, Megha, Muriel, Batoul. Chiara, Dan, while Kristina is creating more soundscapes. Finally, Mesh and Alejandra have started to prepare our ‘making of Roots Guide’ report!
Roots Guide with Hamzah, Rehab, Meghann, Daan and Ingi were featured as one out of 25 ideas for a greener, and brighter future in this National Geographic UK article! And Ingi spoke to future National Geographic Explorers during a live stream.
It has not been an unusual year, but we are very proud of what we have been able to achieve under the pandemic.
At the European HQ of Disney and National Geographic.
We were able to meet up for one in-person workshop this year.
Due to the pandemic, we cancelled all our events and workshop. We worked solely on Roots Guide which is supported by National Geographic Society. We go a minor grant from Haella to cover our costs for Zoom to do our wellbeing sessions.
We are also one of the strategic partners of the ‘Rural Migrantour -Paths of Recovery’ (2020-1-SI02-KA227-YOU-015859) led by Terra Vera which was granted a 2 year support through ERASMUS+ for 2021-23.
