VICTORIA COMMUNITY CENTRE
Latest news from the Victoria Community Centre and our café
The OHF café is a hub of activity and we have been busy with visitors, young and old, over the last few weeks! Alongside providing orange juice, coffee, WiFi and a space to rest and socialise, the café is also a place for our visitors to express themselves through art making. This is a beautiful way for everyone to feel grounded while finding joy in exploring their creativity, experimenting with different materials and getting a sense of calm.
This month we also had the pleasure to welcome Terranova Teatro, who performed the puppet show Urruti Sisters at the Victoria Community Centre. Many thanks for this!
And thank you to all our visitors, staff and partners for your open-minds, good humour, playfulness and creativity!
Volunteers are back
Since the beginning of the summer it is again possible to volunteer at OHF and to support us in the community centre. This month, for example, Emma led the art activities in the café, creating many beautiful works of art with the visitors. We were also very happy to have Christoph, who had previously supported us on Lesvos, with us again. Thanks to him, the building is now full of new colourful signs and also many kids’ eyes were full of sparkles, as he painted children’s faces again – which everyone loved, Spiderman was the most popular choice. Thank you and everyone else who makes the activities at the Community Centre possible!
Some numbers
In general, August was a rather quiet month, the high temperatures in Athens may also have something to do with it. Nevertheless, we welcomed 1,130 visitors who came to our centre because of the activities OHF offers. All in all, 2,258 visitors came to the centre in August.
This month the café served around 620 coffees, 240 teas and 1,480 orange juices, which continues to be very popular.
Team work
As described in previous newsletters, our different teams are working on different subjects. The local coordination team continues to work closely with MAPS. The work on the selected topics is done independently, but there’s a fluent exchange during joint meetings with MAPS.
And the work of the in-house emergency team at the Victoria Community Centre, which consists of people from the different partner organisations, also continues. There is now an evacuation plan and an emergency exercise will soon be ready. We really hope we will never need to implement any of these measures, but we are prepared in case of an emergency.