“A feeling of belonging to a community in the place we call home is very important. During previous years I organised different community programs in Szögliget but in those cases I was the leader. Now I try to step back while at the same time I can create something new that was actually there, hidden in the community.”
Bernadett Virókné Fodor is a Hungarian biologist dedicated to raising public awareness about environmentally conscious and sustainable lifestyles. She lives in a small village, where she has organised children’s summer camps in recent years. In her drama camp, children stage local stories for residents, developing skills to work together as fellow villagers to reach a common goal.
She joined CA in 2023 with a vision of bringing villagers of different generations together and encouraging them to share their knowledge and skills through a series of crafting sessions. Bernadett was aware that the existing local dynamics were challenging, and that engaging different age groups and giving them opportunities to interact would require a range of communication skills.
Bernadett lives in the small village of Szögliget in the Hungarian karst region, where she has run biology programs in national parks and schools for many years. She is also active in her community, running children’s summer camps and volunteering at her church.
Szögliget, a village of 592 inhabitants, has a choir, clubs and various community activities as well as several churches and NGOs, but few of them bring together people of different ages or social groups. One of the points of division in the community was religion, with limited contact between villagers belonging to the Catholic and Protestant churches.
Bernadett wanted to create ways for people from different age groups to spend time together, sharing their skills and experiences. Through crafting sessions, younger people would learn traditional skills like weaving or broom making which were part of everyday life in the past, while older people could try out more modern activities, such as creative painting or using mobile apps, with the help of younger people.
She recognized that engaging different age and gender groups would be a challenge – from breaking down social barriers linked to religious affiliation and finding the right means and tone of communication, to making the workshops easily accessible and appealing to a wide range of villagers. She also wanted to involve craftsmen and educators from local and nearby villages but wasn’t sure whether they would be willing to share their energy, time and knowledge.
Bernadett knew that the local municipality had created a database in 2018 listing local inhabitants willing to share their knowledge about traditional crafting. She contacted the individuals listed as skill-sharers, some of whom agreed to lead workshops and help involve other villagers.
But Bernadett quickly realized that the list was out of date and incomplete and that she would need to reach a broader circle of people on her own. She approaches some participants of her previous sustainable lifestyle courses, who agreed to help get the word out about the opportunity to lead or take part in a workshop. Soon Bernadett had more than enough people to lead the 10 workshops she envisioned.
As she planned the workshop topics, Bernadett tried to accommodate a range of interests and needs. She was conscious that most of the crafting skills were traditionally practiced by women, but she planned events that she hoped could also be interesting for men, like wood carving and open-air-oven bread baking. She also hoped that the workshops would attract entire families and looked for other villagers who would help by looking after small children if need be.
She also carefully considered where to hold the workshops: I asked the mayor to lend the culture centre for the events since I wanted to provide a ‘neutral’ place, because there are religious conflicts among old people in the village. Besides, by choosing the village culture centre (not the old people’s day care centre or the school building) my message was that all generations are welcome. The mayor also let us use the open-air oven for bread baking, that can be found in the yard of the village museum, for free.
The mayor also promised to help promote the workshop series: He was happy about my idea, firstly, he believes that community building programs are important for keeping a village alive, secondly, because he knows my previous community activities.
More help came from unforeseen sources: I got unexpected help from my youngest daughter and her friend (13 year-old girls). They offered to look after smaller kids while their mothers were busy with crafting. Also, there were two young mothers, who were not on the list of crafters I used for organizing my series of events, and they offered to lead two extra crafting events and share their knowledge with others.
She put posters in local shop windows, doctor’s offices and schools, posted on social media, asked local NGOs to spread the word and visited the day care centre for elderly residents to invite people personally. She visited all the people who had agreed to lead a crafting workshop to confirm and arrange the details.
Communicating the project turned out to be demanding, both in terms of time and nuancing her approach to appeal to various groups. Bernadett reflected: For me, letting people know about the events, encouraging them to come were the most demanding and time-consuming activities. I did not think about the use of language when I planned my project, though I should have considered that different generations use different languages even if we had the same mother tongue. But I got positive feedback from one of the participants, saying that she liked best that I could speak the proper language with each generation by switching immediately when I was talking to a different person.
Bernadett held the workshops from mid-January through late March, knowing that villagers are most available in the winter when gardens are dormant. The topics ranged from lace making to weaving on a loom, beekeeping, batik painting, basket weaving, using mobile apps, traditional Easter egg painting and bread baking.
During CA, she learned about ‘asset mapping’, an approach for collecting information about residents’ skills, knowledge and interests and their willingness to share these resources with the community. She recognised that the municipality’s database of crafters and her own workshops were a step in this direction, and also that her fellow villagers had many more skills and knowledge that had yet to be discovered. She decided to use her workshops to uncover some of them: The events will be great occasions for not only sharing the knowledge of skills but also for having informal interviews. This way more assets can be revealed in the community, ideas can be collected that can be used for planning future community building programs.
She paid careful attention to creating a welcoming atmosphere to encourage these informal interviews as well as friendly talks between neighbours: I also set up a ‘tea-corner’ because first of all the culture centre had just a basic heating and a hot drink was good for people in the cold room as well as provided a possibility for participants to relax, have a chat together and that way get to know each other better.
She had originally planned to hold 10 workshops + a final celebratory event but, as she noted, to my surprise many participants became so enthusiastic that finally there were 12+1 events. There were crafting events on every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon at 5 pm in January and February. In March there were fewer events but they were either on Tuesdays or on Saturdays since people got used to having events on those days. She was also pleased that people from some neighbouring villages participated, which she saw as a sign that there is a larger interest in these kinds of events.
At some workshops, the shared activity built bridges between residents who don’t typically interact. Bernadett explained one situation: For the bread baking, I asked a ‘newcomer’ foreigner (he has been living in the village for about 15 years) to lead the event because I felt that he is at the margins of the community. It was amazing to see how he opened towards the community and how the community opened towards him.
Along with the overwhelmingly positive community response to the workshops, one conflict did emerge among participants. Bernadett explained: A participant took really great pictures at the bread baking event which was led by a shy, reserved man. The event was an outstanding example of ‘food brings together’ occasion. Every participant enjoyed it, and it was good to see the shy (foreigner!) man opening towards the community and the community opening towards the shy man. The pictures were posted on Facebook by the participant who took them. Unfortunately, there was a woman from a neighbouring village who made many negative comments and even two months later she went to the wife of the bread baking man, while she was waiting for the bus at the bus stop, to criticise her husband’s work.
The conflict led Bernadett to consider the role social media plays in community building. Social media does have an impact on community events both in a positive way (spreading news among the related/connected people) and in a negative way (criticism without a visible, real face). And it does not matter which way we consider it influences people’s opinion and the hidden, sensitive network among them can change unnoticed, you can see only the top of the iceberg and just suspect what had been going on in the community under the surface.
The events offered opportunities for broader relationship-building among village residents. Bernadett listened very carefully to discussions during the events, where people told personal stories and shared personal examples. She had learned in CA to be cautious about giving advice, so instead she asked people to share examples or just asked them questions to probe their experience.
Altogether 60 persons took part in the workshops, with nearly half attending one workshop and the rest visiting at least three. Bernadett was pleased with the turnout: In a village with only 592 inhabitants, having about 10 percent of the population is a good result.
As she had hoped, the range of workshop topics did attract different segments of the village population. The first few workshops drew mostly women, of various ages; the next couple of events, which were led by men, brought mostly fathers and children; and the third part of the events attracted whole families.
However, two age groups were conspicuously absent: I missed the generation of teenagers and young people in their early 20s. The reason can be that most of them are working or studying in big cities and they are at home only on the weekends, when they are happy to be with their own families.
I (also) hoped for more active participation from old, lonely people. The events were for free and I organized them alternately on weekdays and weekends so that even if not everyone could come to every event, there was a choice.
She explained: I missed the generation who are in their 70s. I had a feeling and also I experienced that even if I invited many of them personally and they said ‘yes’ to me, there were some persons in the village who discouraged the others. I have a theory that this generation was a small kid when in the 1950s people were watched by each other and reported to the political system if they gathered and did things together which was not organized centrally by the government or the local council. So in my opinion watching and discouraging each other originates from that era and has been imprinted into them for life. Though it is true that my events always started at 5 pm when it was already dark in the winter and old people usually do not leave their houses after getting dark. If I had organised my events later, many other generations (working people, children spending the day in kindergarten or school) could not join. On the other hand, as I experienced in the Netherlands (a CA site visit), darkness and cold are not a real obstacle for those who really want to go for an occasion even if they are old.
Comparing this experience to previous community projects she had led, she said: This time, however, I just supported the work of the leaders of the crafting events. To be able to take a step back, the theory of Community Alphabet helped me a lot. This was easy on one hand, but difficult because I was used to leading events and projects. I was afraid whether everything would go well. I had to relax and wait and see what happens. The aim should be to give others space. We may not have perfect results but that’s okay.
And it was a great feeling for me to experience watching people, who were the leaders of the events and from some of whom I knew that they were rather shy and reserved, to open towards the community and the community was happy, accepted the openness and appreciated the shared knowledge/skills.
Summing up, she said: I learnt to take a step back, be more flexible, consider the different needs and interests of different genders and age groups. I also learnt to be more open towards new ideas and if I speak the right language, doors can be opened easily.
Bernadett’s workshops sowed a seed in the village which is now sprouting a number of small spin-off activities:
It was the mayor actually who asked me whether I can continue my project because he heard a lot of positive feedback about it. … The mayor said that it is difficult to organise programs for every age group, so that is why my project was exceptional.
Watch a video about Bernadett’s project.
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