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Borrowing sugar from your neighbors

10/05/2022

You often hear older people say that things were better in the past. You never had to lock your barn and you could always knock on your neighbor’s door for a cup of sugar. These days, we often don’t even know who lives next to, above or below us, and our neighborhoods are filled with signs that say ‘Attention: WhatsApp Neighborhood watch!’ And that cup of sugar? Nobody does that anymore.

Maybe not in a literal sense. But that cup of sugar represents so much more. Not only does it embody our relationship with our neighbors and the street we live in, but it also describes how we treat each other in a city like Eindhoven. It’s a metaphor for giving something to someone without wanting anything in return.

Sitting in our ivory tower – by which I mean the TU/e campus – I sometimes wonder who my neighbors are. And I’m not just talking about the people living above and below me in my ancient residential unit. No, I’m also talking about the students at Fontys and the Design Academy, and those at the SUMMA-college and De Rooi Pannen, and young people who have a job already. In short: what are the dreams and fears of my peers who don’t study at TU/e?

We try to tackle this issue with the Future Mentor Programme. This reversed mentorship program was launched by the European Union and offers young people the opportunity to act as mentor to policymakers for once, instead of the other way around. The aim is to gain insight into the dreams and fears of young people living in European cities. Each participating city will present the results in June during the Eurocities Annual Conference in Espoo, Finland.

In Eindhoven, we decided to collect the dreams and fears of our young people by using that metaphor of a cup of sugar. During our first mentoring session on May 9 we had our mentee, none other than mayor John Jorritsma, ask young people in his city for that cup of sugar. We spoke to young people from practically every imaginable social bubble. And I use that word bubble on purpose because almost everyone told us that they hardly interacted with people from other groups in the city.

Those dreams and fears of young people in Eindhoven – disguised as sugar cubes – should be considered gifts to mayor Jorritsma, because no one wanted anything in return. The issues discussed ranged from housing to mobility and from night life to culture.

Our mayor will take those gifts with him to Espoo next month and share them with several other European cities, represented by young people and their mayor. We want to challenge you to share your ideas and thoughts. We want to hear your dreams and fears concerning the things that matter to you, both for our second mentoring session with the mayor and for the conference in Espoo. Send them to me, or contact one of the other Future Mentors.

To be continued…


TU/e students Aya Bergkamp, Anne Jenster, Ciska Brommer and I, Bram Smolenaars, are Eindhoven’s Future Mentors. For this program, which was launched by the European Union, we work together with the municipality of Eindhoven and the organizing committee of the Eurocities Annual Conference.

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