Over the past few days, many people in Belgium and our neighbouring countries have found themselves in need due to the heavy rains. Our JCI members, all volunteers, immediately rolled up their sleeves. Together with the municipalities and other organizations, they have provided sleeping places, food and drink, and other emergency resources. Meanwhile, they gradually started cleaning up their own homes, businesses and neighbourhoods. Often in difficult circumstances.
We at JCI Belgium are very proud of our local branches and very grateful for all the help they receive. Our JCI members can count on an incredible network. We have received messages of support from all over Belgium and even worldwide. Often followed by the question how they can help. We would like to thank you all very much. Your messages are lights throughout these special days.
The reconstruction will take time and resources. And your support is very welcome. As JCI Belgium members, we find it important to work closely together with others to create the biggest impact possible. Therefore, we coordinate regularly with the local authorities and between the JCI chapters in the entire affected area, including neighbouring countries, and decide together how to best use your support.
Together we will set up actions in the coming weeks around 3 themes that are very important to us, namely:
- Rebuilding the local area and especially the economy in a sustainable way.
- Training that helps our companies and young people to become future-proof.
- The mental well-being of local residents.
How can you help concretely? This can be done in various ways
- By supporting financially through gofund.me/6c39322a or directly on the account of JCI Belgium BE95210094119758
- By doing what you do best: setting up actions together, offering helping hands, finding partners & doing projects to help them.
What are we thinking about specifically?
- The reconstruction
Before we can really rebuild, we need to clean up. This is not yet possible everywhere in a safe way. So be sure to coordinate with the local municipalities on where you can best deploy yourself today. Once we can guarantee the safety of larger groups, we will look into starting up specific JCI group clean-ups.
In the meantime, we do need basic resources such as snowploughs, cleaning supplies and hygienic supplies as well as food and water. If you can provide this in large quantities, please feel free to contact us.
Once we can start rebuilding we will focus on the companies. The goal is to help them reinvent themselves in an innovative, sustainable way. That is why we are thinking of longer-term projects.
In addition, we also want to specifically support our schools in their reconstruction. Young people are the leaders of tomorrow in this changing world and the schools play an important role in this.
- Training
To prepare young people and companies for a changing world by offering them relevant training from all over the world. Our JCI network has experts in sustainability, de-construction, digitalization, financial management and many other skills that are needed now more than ever.
On the one hand, we want to organize these trainings for a wide audience and live translate them into their own native language where necessary and on the other hand, we want to open our network fully to young people from the affected areas. Therefore, we are going to offer some of them a free JCI membership.
- Mental well-being
From JCI we are going to set up a number of actions for local residents and their children with the aim of relaxing and escaping the daily reality. We want to make sure that the actions do not create extra work for our volunteers on the spot and therefore we will involve other local JCI chapters to coordinate this.
If you have a good idea on one or more of our themes or if you want to help execute this, please let us know via info@jci.be or Nele.Buysmans@jci.be.
With warm JCI regards,
On behalf of JCI Belgium,
Nele Buysmans, National President 2021