During the 2022 academic year, in cooperation with an external expert, we visited the Iván Mándy Vocational and Technical School in the district to hold sessions for the 15-19 age group on domestic violence, forms of abuse and female-male social roles.

We have cooperated with the school before when we held discussions with their young vocational students about employment, difficulties, desires, and real-life examples on the occasion of the work club that preceded our youth club.

We believe that it is important to educate the young generation, particularly about the social factors that shape their daily lives, thoughts about themselves, their relationships, and their roles in them.

The Gólya Club is a low-threshold youth space in District VIII, which can be used without any conditions, even anonymously, and is not organized around specific events or activities. District VIII - along with other districts of Budapest - is not well equipped with spaces that are open to young people and focus on them.

The aim of the club is to fill this gap and ensure that young people (especially those that are disadvantaged) do not spend their free time in the streets, but in a safe environment where we provide them with productive leisure opportunities and a place they can freely use. Such low-threshold places function as the first step in the process of solving various social and psycho-social problems. The professionals working here can connect young people with organizations in our environment in order to solve various problems or meet needs.

The goal of the club is to enhance the growth and cooperation of this local network, so from the start, we have maintained contact and correspondence with as many organizations as we can that are connected to our district-wide endeavours and with whom we are looking to collaborate.

In addition to creating a safe space, our goal is to show young people who visit us patterns that might positively influence their current and future lives and circumstances.

Our topics include friendship, relationships with peers, romantic relationships, career guidance, children's rights, media, conscious media use, conflict management, the situation of Roma people, social discrimination, and ways of getting to know our social environment.

Additionally, our goal is to provide beneficial leisure time through a variety of creative methods, including board games, cooperative creation, and events organized on various topics. We often invite external organizations and people who hold sessions for club members on various topics, and we ourselves attend external events as well.

The club is held every Monday and Tuesday from 3 PM to 7 PM, during which time we primarily use the small room upstairs with the young participants. Prerequisites for participation are being within the designated age range (12-25) and compliance with the rules of the club.

At the end of summer 2020, together with the residents of the house at 45 Orczy út, we began gardening the neglected piece of land in front of their house. Prior to the decision, a nine-month community survey was conducted, during which we visited the house and made an effort to speak with every resident about what was bothering them in their environment that they would change. Our goal was to create a sense of community within the house and raise residents' awareness of issues that impact them by identifying a common problem that is simpler to solve and that we can turn into a common cause and consequently into action.

Among the problems voiced by the residents, everyone was undoubtedly upset by the fact that the section of land in front of their house was neglected, littered with trash, and had spilled fuel from parked cars. They preferred to have a garden there and wanted to see Orczy tér and Orczy út improved to have a more pleasing sight.

We started organizing and helping residents get to know each other, and a neighbourhood group was established. Some of the residents had close ties to the group, with whom we met once a week or every two weeks, while other residents were more loosely connected and were only involved in certain things. At our regular meetings, we prepared a plan that outlined the desired design of the garden, the tasks to be completed, the people to be contacted, addressed, and, if needed, pressurized.

We worked together on the garden for about a year, during which we carried out physical gardening work three times with the residents of the house and volunteers. We loosened the soil, added compost, constructed a small fence, made a road, and planted a lot of donated plants. Beside the construction works, we worked mainly to get in touch with other residents of the house, to clarify the legal status of the area, and to draw the attention of the district and the municipality of the capital to the responsibility of caring for their green spaces and public areas, and the apparent neglect of this.

The garden was eventually finished with the help of the residents, volunteers, a rural gardening company, the municipality and the Gólya Cooperative, and it still exists today, maintained by the house.

After the completion of the garden, we continued to work with the group on their dissatisfaction and conflicts regarding the apartment representative team of the house. We still have an active relationship with them to this day, lending each other things, talking and exchanging information. We are especially proud that all this was accomplished during the Covid pandemic!

One of the activities of the neighbourhood program is to organize events in and around the building that address and respond to the needs of the people living here. This is also one of our tools for getting to know the people living here, introducing ourselves, and involving them in our other projects.

Due to the Covid pandemic and the related regulations, we were unable to truly work on event organization for about two years following our 2019 launch, as it was unsafe. In 2020, we organized a street music parade, and transported musicians from District VIII to different parts of the Orczy and Magdolna quarters on cargo bicycles provided by the Gólya Cooperative's courier service. Those at home could listen to the music from their windows and balconies, and the participants could meet their friends and acquaintances safely in the open air. Our intention was to help local musicians as well, who lost their primary source of income as a result of the pandemic. The event was a great success among district residents.

After the last wave of the Covid pandemic, we started to organize regular events. One of the most popular and largest of these is our autumn cooking competition, which has already been held twice. On these occasions, teams cook seasonal dishes in Hungarian cauldrons on the terrace, and an independent jury decides who will take the travelling trophy home. We also organize family- and kid-friendly activities at these events. Every year, district locals, families, groups of friends and organizations take part in this cooking competition. We are extremely glad that this event always attracts diversity; homeless people, refugees, intellectuals, Roma and non-Roma, young and old people participate in different activities together, and spend time with each other.

In addition to this, we are working more and more closely with the event and concert planning team of the Gólya Cooperative, organizing events that might be interesting and important for local families, such as a recent Farsang carnival, a May Day celebration, and a karaoke party.

We ran this project from winter 2020 to winter 2021. In 2020, the Hungarian health insurance system underwent a change that had a negative impact on many people and continues to do so. Yet, many people are still unaware of these facts. The main shift is a considerably stricter approach to the handling of debt accumulation.

If a person's debt exceeds 6 months' worth of fees (HUF 67,800), their social security number (TAJ) is invalidated, forcing them to pay for general medical care, and purchase state-sponsored medicine at full price. If they are in need of urgent, life-saving care, they will be charged for it afterwards.

Since the start of the neighbourhood program, we have been concerned with providing assistance in interpreting legal and official materials because, in Hungary, the use and development of straightforward language is not given priority in printed information, official letters or internet platforms. Our project focused on this as well as on informing those living in our environment.

We also tried to organize an NGO roundtable on the issue at hand to see if we can reach higher-ups, and possibly even spur a change in the law. During the project, we were unable to organize a professional forum, mostly for reasons beyond our control. Additionally, the office hours service proved to be high-threshold, with only a small number of individuals being able take advantage of it. Nevertheless, we were able to inform large number of people, and provide assistance in specific situations on many occasions.