Personal Summaries

Lara: (interview) Organising at the wuppbreak was not so good. We were a big group - and it felt more like meetings than building a group. But, it is not so important to plan; we are not the same group of people that will be travelling together. When we are travelling and moving we can focus more  on our vision and details. I talked with lots of people - got to know their vision more. I have a clearer vision for myself and yunity also.
Vision: I want to travel around, meet people, get inspired by their ideas, connect different projects. I would like to learn about farming and permaculture. I would like that we have many villages connected so would like have more people for a network. I would like to bring the sharing culture to other countries. Would like to get more open and aware. I would like to focus on personal growth
Plans: I won't plan anything: but I would like to be with bigger group and travel with them. I saw in August that it is easy - to get food, to live. With more people we have more interests so we can connect more and more people.

Axel: (interview) Not a lot of progress at the wuppbreak - more of a break that wupping. Important to get to know each others visions. I think we need to communicate better.  In the future we should not plan: we should just go. Because there is a lot of different people with a lot of different visions but we all go in the same direction: so we will meet anyway. We should start now and move forward. I believe the platform will be ready soon. Important to spread the word and enlarge the movement: building up the netwok. Everyone is different. yunity is tolerent and diverse. Sometimes you need some passion to start this community. Understand the other point of view of "organic" community. When I see the foodsharing map, I see how effective it is; and how positive it works to bring people together. Sometimes you need some energy to start a project. Really easy to start. You just bring the idea. Rotterdam = 540 people in group - still saving without us.
Vision: to make sure people can live today through: with no money or less money. My thoughts are to enable other people - try to get as much people as we can to live this kind of lifestyle, if they want. My vision is to build up a strong network/infrastructure to live the lifestyle we value. I think it is not so hard - it is about trust. It starts at the family - and then move towards strangers. Start with basic needs and move forward. Really easy to start this network and then build up.
Plans: I have to build myself a new kind of environment. It's not so easy to live between two worlds: normal lifettle and this one. I am living between the two lifestyles. I think I need to make a descison and build up a kind of environment that supports that.  

• 26th sept: Warsaw
• 7th oct: Berlin
• 11th oct: Marseille

Fritz: (written statement) In the first meeting/gathering it seemed that there were different ideas on how to approach tours.
Some people wanted to plan concretely where and when to establish a foodsharing-network using the "FS-Int tool", whereas others felt the need to establish a sense of group-coherence first and approach the tour in a more flexible way considering the local community's needs. At first there was a dissonant feeling in the group until we started openly discussing the issue, which resulted in a more harmonic atmosphere between everyone. I think the conclusion was that more groups will form organically and several tours will be happening simultaneously with slightly different approaches still being in regular communication and exchange.
Plan: I don't have a fixed plan yet, but I will be free for the rest of the year to possibly go to Marseille, Vienna, Dublin, Spain, Greece to support local communities / projects and network. I am really interested in brining together everybody involved and establish one united network and communication channel.

Paul: (written statement) The interests of being on tour are different. Meetings and conversations helped to clear different points. Some people are focusing on when and where to start food saving with the help of the FSINT tool. While having a fixed concept in mind the interest of rethinking was small. Building a new concept within a new team constellation wasn't possible. Arguments of timepressure to start the tour were in my perspective irrevelant when there was a lot of time spent on drugs and smalltalk during the Wuppbreak. One of my main intention attending to the wuppbreak was to connect with the different touring approach finding out collaboration possibilities. While the motivations behind building communitys and networks still being quite similar it's about learning from each other and reflecting on the different aproaches. I think it's difficult when a group openly invites for a tour but at the same time closing the space for group building. It was good to see that people are following their dreams and ideas without being missleaded from different approach or critisism. Another approach of traveling is focusing on yunity as a whole. Many ideas, dreams and concepts are already in the room and been actively worked on. Being critical towards the way foodsharing.de build up and testing different ways of group organisation free from power and structural supported hieracys. Many touring groups will form simultaneously with the intention of being in regular communication and exchange. As a communication platform there is since now yunity.trydiscourse.com available. I hope to see monthly community updates. :) Paul's plans are: finding and building groups with strong dynamics leading to happy, joyful, love, active, radical, peaceful and harmonious results with an interest of traveling for change.

Anna: I felt a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication between the "groups". I felt individual tensions created an environment that was difficult to be in. I felt there was impatience and stress from some people.  So I took a step back from it. I think what happened was that one group were focused on planning foodsharing tours. It difficult for new people to join this group and share their ideas - as the work towards foodsharing tours has been in the process long before now. There are newer members who have the idea to spread the vision of yunity without focusing on one part, but who will enevitably raise awareness of foodsharing in the process, anyway. I feel also that people in this "group" also made it difficult for those who have been in the process of planning for a while.  To me, it doesn't really matter so much - as each person travels with the same aim of spreading yunity vision, and will do so with a group of people they work well with and trust. The main problem at Wuppbreak was not allowing space for group dynamics to build - something which I see as as essential for travelling and doing actions. Vision: Although I learnt (from august) the need to be sensitive and open to new ways of bringing the communities together, I see foodsharing as a solid way to do this. I trust that all members of yunity would be sensitive and open to the community. But I am not aware of all the previous 'problems' with starting a foodsharing community. I would like first to be in a new place, see what exists in that area area, meet motivated people, before seeing where I can fit in.
I am always open to every approach and the best is that everyone is doing what they feel is right. I am interested in touring in general with yunity. looking to see where we can connect, spread our vision of sharing culture best. Plan: In Marseille from October onwards. In Scotland/Ireland for December. Thinking about Turkey for Jan/Feb if possible (philip has links!)

Selina (interview): Connection happened. And understanding visions of all the people. A few meetings but not very productive (due to diversity of visions). People came to the meeting with different expectations. We had a reflection of last tour in August. Collaboration cafe happened. I understand  more and wanted to go deeper into it, but it will happen in the tours. Its important to be not fixed on idea for the tour and it was interesting at the collaboration cafe to see who came along. I am more enlightened now - to what is yunity and what the overal picture is. Vision: Vision is to bring people together, creating space for people to connect (circles). Time is important. Understanding, observation, awareness, listening is all very important. Personal growth is very important. To change the world we must start with ourself. To inspire people to do what they want to do - not nesccessarily be part of yunity. Many people in yunity are living the project - unlike a lot of projects. Plans: I want to go on the tour as soon as possible.

Taïs (written statement): I learnt that the tours were imminent shortly before joining the WuppBreak. What I had thought would be a 2017 deal was actually right about to start, for me it was then important to:

• make sure our different visions for the tour makes sense together
• establish strong basis for supporting foodsaving communities, which is :
  1. assessing what the software will be able to do and when
  2. the follow-up of work started months ago mostly by Janina, Tilmann and myself (MediaKit, contacts, ..)

I hadn’t had much time to prepare a possible meetings structure or agenda, in fact it felt like we all improvised on the spot. People left the first meeting skeptical, although I believe the first part of the meeting clearly indicated that our visions were very easy to unite, if not already one. Then we somehow drowned in tangled group dynamics. Some possible reasons I see:

• nobody was willing to take on facilitation (it becomes hard to find a neutral facilitator as the opinions gather around the “dreamers” pole and the “pragmatists” pole)
• impatience from myself, Janina (maybe others?) to get down to practical details. Maybe a bit traumatized from Rotterdam experience, with yunity tours meetings being extremely unproductive and confusing, as it became the place for new yuniteers to share dreams for hours on end.
• unwillingness from some to see the group divide

The daily tours meetings that took place with a co-created agenda were concerning the destinations, the MediaKit, and the software. I walked out of each of those with clearer thoughts about the tours. They managed to make developers motivated to work on the software (led to a dev meeting about narrowing down features). Overall positive and enabling us to work remotely on commonly decided goals. From the diversity of people interested in the tours, I gained faith once more that we, as a functioning group, have a lot to offer even without a ready software. I was first quite stubborn about not joining on tours if there was no software to offer but I’m now much more flexible on this.

My vision for the tour is well summarized here under “Priorities”. I want to identify which situation we would join each time, because the means and the goals vary for each of them.

(1) For the foodsaving communities, we could have focus on :

• the software, if they wish to test it. Then we would need people who know about it.
• community organisation. If and only if these communities wish to explore the different ways (preferably hierarchyless) they can organize themselves.

(2) For enthusiasts

• a well-done Media-Kit
• people aware of practical facts on how to set up foodsharing

(3) For potential foodsharing places

• networking people
• motivated people

At this point, I’d be interested to go to Copenhagen and Edinburgh. I would consider joining in big cities to try and find motivated people to start foodsharing there (3) (we talked about Barcelona, Budapest). Only when we have a system in place that I’m satisfied with (namely, a good software and a good MediaKit), I would love to expand the tours to every possibility that arises - and they do that quite a lot in yunity ;)

Janina: (written statement): I think we clarified the situation in terms of how different people envision the tour. There are definitely different dreams, but I think we worked productively on bringing them together. We shared information about where we already have contacts and planned quite a bit for the FSINT tour approach. There could have been more meetings and it's mostly my fault that they didn't take place.. My vision for the tour is already on the wiki: yunity and FSINT. My personal plans for the tour are still quite vague, since I will be moving soon and don't know how much time I'll have in the coming months. But what I know for sure is, that I won't be traveling for a longer period of time at once. Every two to three weeks I'll be going home for a while, so that I'll basically be spending 50% of my time on the road and 50% in Berlin