Wake Up Call

Become a climate movement-builder!

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:33:20 +0000

Wake Up Call partners up with 350.org: “Wake Up, Build the Solutions, Build the Action!”

Here’s some great news for the European youth climate movement. Together with 350.org, UKYCC and Nest, we’re creating a bunch of new international climate leaders. We’re gathering 40 young climate actors from across Europe in Berlin on August 28^th–29^th for trainings in global campaigning, social entrepreneurship and traditional and social media tactics. Nine of these leaders will be from Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland) and Wake Up Call will hand-pick them. This is your opportunity to pick up the skills you need from successful professionals and current movement leaders. Going home you will be a 10/10/10 ambassador determined to make 350 Global Work Party on October 10^th as widespread as possible. Indicate and motivate your interest to sven@wakeupcall.se and maybe we’ll see you in Berlin in the end of August!

Check the full invitation to the 1^st Climate Action Workshop Europe

The Political Week in Almedalen

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:28:17 +0000

‘Wake Up Call’ attended the political week in Almedalen for the first time and we were blown away by the massive energy and engagement from the 70.000 participants. Beautiful Visby offered over 1000 seminars and mingles that catalyzed the efforts of everyone involved.
As social entrepreneurs we were very happy to see the concept of social entrepreneurship being embraced by everyone from politics to business to civil society as a great way of creating positive change. The idea of “Intrapreneurship” – to create change through entrepreneurial methods inside established organizations, was frequently used by many.

Are you coming with us to Finland?

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:47:43 +0000

‘Wake Up Call’ is invited to Finland, and we want you to tag along. The event is called Globsol and is a playground for bright young people from Sweden and Finland interested in global issues and creating change. The weekend will be spent in Helsinki on October 15-17 where four parallel workshops will be held. The topics are 1) “Social Responsibility as Business Strategy” 2) “Fair Trade Conditions” 3) “Climate as a Trade Commodity” 4) “Food and Trade”. They are all designed to give the participants a better understanding of the respective issues while producing some measurable results. ‘Wake Up Call’ has been asked to lead workshops nr 1 (Sven) and 3 (Oleg), and this is your opportunity to join our workshops. For €75 you will get everything covered: travel, food, accommodation and event. That is a very fair trade if you ask us. Log on to www.globsol.info and sign up!

200 youth prepared for 350’s Global Work Party

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:57:16 +0000

Last week ‘Wake Up Call’ went to Älvdalen in Dalarna, Sweden, to inspire 200 youth at the local secondary school. We were given half a day so we could start off by helping the students to understand what is happening to our reality, why it is happening, and what young people around the world are doing about it. Then we trained them in small scale project management and let them start up local initiatives for 350’s Global Work Party on 10/10/10. Good ideas were in abundance as usual. Among them, plans for installing solar panels on the municipal swimming hall, arranging a bike race through the community and organizing an acoustic rock concert. We were especially excited about the engagement from the municipality. The local hero and head of Environment, Edita Platbardis, promised to support the implementation of the most promising ideas as well as report back to us about the outcome of 10/10/10. Awesome!

Anyone can contribute to BIG solutions, just take a look:

Was the World Reworked?

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 09:51:43 +0000

For the past four days over 1,700 social entrepreneurs, politicians and investors gathered in Leksand for the summit “Rework the World”. The even was organised by Tällberg Foundation and the network YES (Youth Entrepreneurship and Sustainability), and was the biggest gathering of this kind that ever happened in Sweden. The ambition and the vision were to create millions new sustainable jobs for the world’s youth. We (that is Oleg and Sven) were there too, accompanied by a team of our capable interns, Carl, Sophie and Josefine.

“The organisers had identified 150 projects and social enterprises with an enormous potential to make a difference and create jobs for young people”, says Oleg. Those were highlighted and presented during the summit’s many workshops and seminars. “There’s products and services that can really make a difference on the global level. We were fascinated by, among others, Peepoople and EEMPC. Peepoople presented a cheap and environmentally-friendly solution for sanitation that has a potential to save many lives in the Global South, while EEMPC recreates the entire ecosystems previously thought to be lost forever. Social entrepreneurship is an important part of a sustainable society and more and more people become aware of it. Politicians, investors, media and academia are very welcome to hurry up and recognise this development”, insists Oleg.

Sven Heijbel is satisfied with the fact that social and environmental crises and the youth unemployment are recognised as important issues in the election campaign in Sweden and received enough attention at the summit. Still, he was slightly critical about the event’s proceedings.

“We were many that thought that the organisers hadn’t worked hard enough to adapt the summit’s format to the aims it claimed”, he says. “1,700 fantastic brains were gathered together and we wished they were used more efficiently to solve the challenges and remove the bottlenecks of the top identified projects. Conversations and analysis got more space and time than the more practically-oriented problem-solving, like so many times before. At the same time the human capital of the event was very impressive and invaluable. Our inspiration is now reaching new heights and the development of Wake Up Call’s own projects was obviously catalysed as a result of this summit, thanks to our new partnerships and ideas”, concludes Sven.

Going to Rework the World!

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:19:15 +0000

We are really psyched up about the global gathering ‘Rework the World’ that starts on the 2^nd of June in Leksand, Sweden. This year it is a combination of Tällberg Forum and the Youth Employment Summit (YES). Therefore the main topic of the conversations in Leksand will be: How do we create between 500 million and 1 billion new sustainable jobs for young people around the world in the next couple of decades? The summit’s five main themes: Energy, Water, Land, Cities and People and hundreds of sessions and workshops, not even mentioning informal talks and project meetings, keep us buzzing with enthusiasm and excitement! Starting tomorrow, we are going to Rework the World! Literally.

P.S.: We are also very happy and proud to have finished updating our new website just in time for the summit. The English and Swedish versions are now fully functional and we invite you to explore ‘Our Story’, ‘Our Services’, ‘Our Portfolio’, or what the (mostly Swedish) press had to write about Wake Up Call. Other languages will have to wait until after we return to our office in Lund, but rest assured we stay committed to linguistic and cultural diversity that is one of Wake Up Call’s core values.

P.P.S.: If you cannot attend the summit in person, you can still follow it via miracles of the Web and the live video feed from the event.

Welcome to our new website!

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 09:30:09 +0000

Hello and welcome to Wake Up Call’s brand new site that we just launched. We are working hard on developing the website’s structure and filling in with relevant and interesting information. Please bear with us until we are done with this. Meanwhile you can check our regularly updated page on Facebook.