Hey everybody!

For those of you who don’t know me (which is most of you), my name is Maggie Bailey and I am an intern from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA and will be interning at Volonteurope for the next couple of months!

I started my adventure on 1 January 2026, by flying to New York City and then flying from New York to Brussels. On the 5th of January, I met up with Furkan in person for the first time and went to the office, and then the next day all my travel caught up with me and I got sick, just in time to leave for Bulgaria.

Sofia and 4Voices

Furkan and I gathered in Sofia (along with Costin Dedu and a number of other partners in the 4Voices project) in order to train the facilitators for the 4Voices Regional Futures Workshops.

These workshops will be held in each of the four regions (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and the Western Balkans) in the coming months. Between partners and facilitators, there were about 15-20 of us in total from all over Europe in Sofia.

The largest chunk of this training was dedicated to working through the activities and materials for the 4Voices project, in order for the facilitators to be able to see what the experience would be like, and to troubleshoot the instructions in order to make sure that they all made sense and accomplished the objectives of the 4Voices project.

Futures Podcast

One of the impactful experiences for us that we hope will be impactful to our participants, was the 4Voices podcast and memory walk.

We all listened to the podcast with our own headphones, individually, with our eyes closed, so that we could more fully “envision the future”, following which we were invited to read stories that had been provided by the participants in the 4Voices Opening in May 2025 — stories related to them by their parents or grandparents about particular times of democracy or social change that stand out to them.

Many of these stories were full of emotion, and led to many of the participants in the memory walk feeling strong emotions as well.

Marrakech and Hacktive Youth

Following the training I flew back to Brussels and spent Saturday exploring. On Sunday I flew to Marrakech to meet up with Furkan and two volunteers from Global Shapers Hub Brussels who had come from Brussels to complete the Volonteurope team.

A group of youth workers, stakeholders and others from eight different countries gathered in Morocco for a training regarding Social Hackathons to promote active citizenship among youth. We spent the week getting to know each other, and learning about social hackathons, as well as interacting with Moroccan youth to discuss challenges youth face in becoming active citizens, and experiencing some Moroccan culture.

Back to Brussels

Post-Morocco I spent a relatively calm week in Brussels, before diving into events. I attended the European Economic and Social Committee’s foresight hearings with Furkan, and then attended “The Future is Erasmus” Erasmus Student Network Conference with David Lopez. This conference centered on the Erasmus+ program, and its priorities as well as what the upcoming plans were, as far as they could have upcoming plans given the current unknowns of the upcoming budget.

All in all, I have had a whirlwind of a first month at my Volonteurope internship! I have met a lot of interesting people, and seen lots of cool things, and I hope that I can keep up during my next two months!