The Culture Working Group (CWG) was born in 1997 and aims to show people that they are surrounded by culture through music, theater, cinema or any kind of art and history. CWG was created as a space where people can give their own interpretation and meaning. The activities you can find in the group are Intercultural communication training, online discussions, creating compilations, promoting culture among AEGEE members, challenging AEGEE members to discover the meaning of the word “culture”, demonstrating that culture can be found in the way people behave, think, dress and others.
After a lot of work and a lot of research, Culture Working Group was able to bring to the attention of the AEGEEans the third edition of the Quotes Calendar 2015. The team in-charge of the calendar was composed of: Erika Bettin (AEGEE-Venezia) who collected the quotes, categorized and proofread them; Inge Zlatkou – AEGEE-Ioannina, who was in-charge of the design and Sabina Guja (AEGEE-Cluj-Napoca) the CWG speaker. The girls have managed to fill all 365 days of the year with 365 quotes starting with “All we need is love, but a little chocolate from now and then doesn’t hurt” (Charles M. Schulz) on the 1st of January and ending with “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves…” for the 31st of December.
Erika was the one who took the lead on creating this year’s calendar, coming up with the idea of collecting quotes from all over the network, thereby making all of the AEGEEans a part of the team in creating the project.
The categories from which the quotes are inspired are creativity, music, movies, literature and inspiration, to name just a few, all of course having their own dose of motivation. For instance, May’s quote was “Every day may not be good, but there’s something good in every day!” If you haven’t got the calendar yet, you can download it from here.
Inge Zlatkou, who created the layout says that “since each month has its own topic, you can get an idea of what pretty much to expect when reading the quotes. Sometimes reading a random quote can be frustrating if you don’t know the general context that it belongs to.”
CWG is now trying to adjust to the new form of Group adapted at AGORA Asturias which is the Interest Group.
Asked about their future plans at the beginning of May, Inge replies: “About CWG’s current plans, until further notice we continue with our current projects, the biggest being right now the collaboration with SUs. This year we have six SU who are collaborating with us. Our help is focused on offering advice and ideas for organizing cultural, fun, entertaining and engaging activities for their SU. We also did a few short interviews with the antennae in order to help them promote their activity within the network through CWG’s means of communication”.
“For this project” she continues, “we have a group of four CWG members acting as contact person between the organizing antennae and CWG: Paula Rodríguez (AEGEE-Castellón), Jovana Trajkovic (AEGEE-Belgrade), Erika Bettin (AEGEE-Venezia) and Sabina Guja (AEGEE-Cluj-Napoca).”
Last year the collaboration with the antennae that chose to work with the Culture Working Group was good and they hope that this year it will be even better. “We are hoping that these SUs will be memorable and fun for the participants, and present the culture of their locations well. We are always ready to help antennae create good and culture focused events” concludes Inge.
Written by Gabriela Cioată, AEGEE-București