What is a “Workcamp”?
Our workcamps are 5- to 10-day summer camps where young people can learn ecological building or gardening skills in workshops with a focus on creating a hands-on group project by the end of the camp.
Our vision:
We want to inspire young people to pursue a sustainable career and personal lifepath. It is important to us to reach interested people of all different personal backgrounds and experiences and to facilitate communal learning on equal footing.
We do manual work, discover our own potential and discuss our professional paths with skilled experts and other likeminded people.
We endorse antidiscrimination, gender equality and ecological sustainability. This is why we especially encourage refugees and people with immigrant backgrounds as well as people with disabilities to participate in our workcamps. We want to promote a cliché-free approach to professional trade labour. Ecological sustainability is an important factor throughout the workcamps, e.g. when choosing materials, food and accommodations.
About the Wangeliner Workcamps:
Seven different workcamps offer the possibility to experience sustainable building and ecological gardening. Our main focus is getting to know different professions through hands-on practice. Furthermore, we invite experts in the ecological trades and building to tell us about their professional paths and experiences.
The seven workcamps are:
- Upcycling – creative building by reusing materials
- Earth, Fire and Bread – building clay ovens
- Tracking down the original – ecological restoration of an old house
- Heat source sun – building solar showers
- Tattoos on the wall – creative designs with clay and colours
- The straw bale bridge – architecture from the fields
- Fruit manufacture – modern homesteading on the orchard meadow
We offer free participation in one or more workcamps for young people between 16 and 24 who have their registered residence in the eastern federal states of Germany (with the exception of the regions Leipzig and Berlin). All costs (participation fee, travel, food and accommodation) are covered by the European Social Fond and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.
The Wangeliner Workcamps take place on the grounds of the European School of Earth Building and the Wangeliner Garten in a village called Wangelin located in northern Germany (directions). We strive toward a sustainable lifestyle, including organic and vegetarian food. In our summer kitchen, we prepare meals together during the workcamps. We look forward to your collaboration and active participation. Please inform us about allergies or other dietary issues, so that we can try to prepare accordingly.
If you plan to arrive via public transportation, it is possible to be picked up at the train station in Meyenburg and the central bus station in Lübz (in rare cases also from other locations). We explicitly encourage climate-friendly transportation and carpooling. We can reimburse travel costs up to 150 Euros.
Accommodation is provided in the simple but comfortable lodgings by the Wangeliner Garten. Participants usually share a room. It is also possible to camp on the grounds.
We provide safety shoes with steel toe caps and a project shirt. Please note your shoe and clothing size in the application form. Please dress in work clothes.
The project:
The project “Wangeliner Workcamps – eine grüne Idee von Zukunft“ is sponsored from 2015-2018 as part of the ESF national programme Berufsbildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung befördern. Über grüne Schlüsselkompetenzen zu klima- und ressourcenschonendem Handeln im Beruf – BBNE (Vocational training for sustainable development. Green key skills for resource-saving and climate-friendly professional practice) by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and the European Social Fond.
The workcamps are an initiative of the European School of Earth Building and the Wangeliner Garten under the organising institution Verein zur Förderung ökologisch-ökonomisch angemessener Lebensverhältnisse westlich des Plauer Sees (FAL e.V.).