ScoutingTrain 2014 - Create Understanding

In 2014, the ScoutingTrain will depart from Berlin with international project teams on board, heading for Irkutsk with stops in Poland, Belarus, and Moscow.

400 scouts and guides will travel on the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway and be an active part of an international educational project. This journey will take us to a scout camp at Lake Baikal. There we will explore the area together, work on our projects, and interact with the locals, thus supporting an on-going dialogue between different nations and experiencing a modern and very international rediscovery of the joys of scouting.

It must be said, however, that the ’ScoutingTrain’ is much more than just a train journey. A train? Yes. With carriages? Yes. But while the engine is making the train move, the real driving forces for this journey are building steam inside the carriages! This is where our conductors and their passengers are. The conductors, having developed a number of projects throughout the year, by way of Conductors’ Academies, where they meet their teams and mentors, called ’switchmen’, and create the concept of their carriage. They arrange their meetings to allow all the passengers of each carriage get to know each other prior to the journey. This way the conductors become true ambassadors of our idea.

Each carriage tells its own story and together we are creating an even bigger narrative
Let us introduce our carriages:

• YOUROPE - Youth in Scouting, boundless!
 | http://yourope.scoutingtrain.org
Young people in Europe and what connects us.
• Orkestar | http://orkestar.scoutingtrain.org

Music knows no borders! Meet our ScoutingTrain Orchestra and its international team.
• Your Opportunity | http://opportunity.scoutingtrain.org

Use your opportunities! Videos about the opportunities to shape your own future.
• Time Travel | http://timetravel.scoutingtrain.org

A journey in space and time! How does the history of our ancestors influence us?
• Tradition & Modernity | http://traditionmodernity.scoutingtrain.org

Make new out of old! How we can use traditions in modern times.
• Green Energy | http://greenenergy.scoutingtrain.org

We only have one world! How can we protect it and leave it a little bit better than we found it?
• Lights of Happiness | http://happiness.scoutingtrain.org

Peace and Happiness! What happiness means and where we can find it.
• Kon-nection | http://konnection.scoutingtrain.org

There is only one language for animal lovers. Let’s overcome language barriers and distances on the back of a horse.
• Once a Scout - Always a Scout | http://foundation.scoutingtrain.org

Lifelong scouting! Opportunities you have once you’ve grown out of the target group.
• Project group ‘Moscow city game’ | http://citygame.scoutingtrain.org

Our journey begins with a mutual game in Moscow and that means a four day treasure hunt through the city!

With this project, we hope to write our page in the history of European integration and mutual development and there will be plenty of stories to tell! This is why we are going to meet again in Berlin on 9 November 2014, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We want to show the public that the stories that make up Europe’s history are still being told and will be told in the future.

On 9 November, we will meet again, exactly where the journey began.
In Berlin. Again, we’ll tell our stories, but this time our audience will be the citizens of the German capital. 25 years earlier, people here celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and on the anniversary we will celebrate the fact that we took part in making other walls fall - those in people’s minds.

More than just a train journey - why Lake Baikal is not the end of the journey

For our project to change Europe, it is not enough to take the train and travel to Lake Baikal. We want to develop and communicate as many different aspects of successful youth work as possible. We want to enable many people to organise similar follow-up projects and to remember how they did it on the ScoutingTrain. We pass the contacts and necessary tools to the conductors and in doing so enable them to share their excitement about this kind of project with others.


Our message is: We want to use the unique memories of the ScoutingTrain journey and capture them in pictures in order to promote the following ideas

• International youth work can bring down barriers[*]Thanks to the culture of the journey and the camp, as well as the international scouting culture, young people and especially scouts and guides meet all requirements to do this [*]It has been 25 years since the Berlin Wall ceased to be and with our project we want to destroy the walls left in people’s minds

Our conductor teams are being supported and supervised by the switchmen, mentors and coaches throughout the year.

Although the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, there are still walls in people’s minds. Together, we can tear them down!

• Fire up the engine so that we can move forward with the project! Even a little donation will keep the train going![*]With our project, we are playing our part in building a network of young Europeans – and to do it we need your help! Together we can encourage and develop mutual understanding between the cultures.[*]Fire up!! With the recent political developments, we feel that our goal is even more important and hope that we can spread our message.

Your donation helps young people from East and West to get to know each other! We are fostering the civil society!

1. To enable 100 project leaders to go to Russia this summer and promote our idea there, we need to hit a target of EUR 100.000.[*]If, together, we manage to raise EUR 800.000, we can take 400 scouts and guides to Lake Baikal and tell our stories to the people we meet on the way and at our destination. Every passenger will have to pay for their journey to Moscow and their flight back home from Lake Baikal.[*]Our aim is to raise EUR 1.300.000.With this funding we can meet in Berlin in November to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall and tell our story to the people of Germany. This sum will enable us to travel to Moscow together and cover our flights home.

Participants’ contribution:
Everyone who will join us on the journey in summer will have to pay a contribution of EUR 500.Travel expenses for the journey to Moscow and the flights back will be in addition to this if higher fund-raising target is not met.

What happened so far:
We managed to organize two conductor academies already: one in november 2013 and one in february 2014. This two meetings were founded by the Stiftung Pfadfinden, the Foundation of German-Russian Youth Exchange and the foundation Avec et pout autres.

Find more informations about our finance structure here: http://www.scoutingtrain.org