Goodbye from Mareike
When I first arrived at BPEC in 2004 it was a building site. A dedicated team of volunteers with Hannah Judge Brown as coordinator tried to re-establish the organisation after it had been closed for several years. I stumbled into the chaos looking for a 6 months internship while researching my Master thesis in the UK. Somehow I got stuck!
After 2 years of volunteering I went on to coordinate BPEC and faced a sharp learning curve. I was a novice to strategic planning, budget and project mangement and had to learn everything from scratch. However, the good thing about working for a small organisation is that new ideas can be put into practice instantly.
BPEC had faced the same problem for many years: due to funding issues it only reached out to a limited amount of people in Brighton & Hove. Together with Mandy Curtis, who manages the DfID funded schools education project, the support of the Management Committee and a wonderful team of volunteers, we brought in new funding and projects, shaping BPEC's focus, working more strategically and reaching out to older people, children, students and teachers.
Goodbye from Mareike The work has been very rewarding: listening to children telling each other about solutions to Climate Change; seeing people discuss the injustice in the world after a workshop about unfair trade conditions; advising interested teachers about bringing more global perspectives into their teaching - all this is BPEC. And although the work was sometimes frustrating, when funding did not get through or the work load seemed overwhelming, in the end it was worth it!
When we recruited Aisha as new Centre Coordinator, I knew that BPEC would be in brilliant hands. I always wanted to live closer to my family and when I was offered a job in Germany (and since then a job with Greenpeace in Amsterdam), I took the position. BPEC has now employed a new Education Coordinator, Ruth England, who used to coordinate the programme of another Development Education Centre in Kent. Ruth works one day a week before she joins the organisation full-time at the beginning of February.
Although BPEC has progressed immensely in the last few years, there is still much left to do but I am confident that the fantastic team of Aisha, Mandy and Ruth, together with BPEC's Board of Trustees and its dedicated supporters and volunteers, will lead the organisation into a thriving future.
I wish BPEC all the best and will always stay involved in one way or the other.