Tag Archive for: CreativeHubs

Learning opportunities between European Creative Hubs

 

Next week we will be flying to Spain to experience at first hand the coworking life in  Malaga and more specifically in the creative hub The Living Room (TLR).

Olga Paraskevopoulou (founder of Stone Soup) and George-Carey Simos (Digital Strategist, Stone Soup resident), will spend 5 days in the beautiful Andalusian city in order to learn and exchange best practices, engage in learning experiences and knowledge transfer as well as to co-create and present a joint event at the hosting hub.

Stone Soup was selected by the European Creative Hubs Network (ECHN) and the Goethe-Institut and was awarded the Peer 2 Peer mobility grant. During the exchange Stone Soup and The Living Room Coworking will share experiences on how to scale a hub from a small operation to a successful and profitable business with space management technology and automation as a key component. We will also look into the great synergies that can happen, if we operate an agency within our hub and work on impactful projects with our members.

The exchange programme is supported by the Creative FLIP project, which is co-funded by the European Commission. Creative FLIP supports healthy & sustainable ecosystems related to Finance, Learning, Innovation & Patenting for CCIs in Europe. The project is implemented by a consortium of six partners, spearheaded by Goethe Institut Brussel and the European Creative Hubs Network.

Do you have to leave Greece to start your career?

We talked to Daphne Xourafi this week and our conversation raised one daunting question.

Can you find work in Greece if you are a highly trained and skilled young professional?

The social and economic crisis has deeply affected the living conditions and opportunities in Greece, resulting in unemployment and a poor working environment. Human capital flight, or brain drain is usually described as a problem that needs to be solved.

However, there are benefits that can be derived from this process. The country can naturally profit when talented workers return with new competencies and carry the prospect to create better job possibilities for Greeks. Another phenomenon that also acts as a bridge between the Greek and the international scene is the attraction of foreign human capital. Professional nomads are not merely tourists but they come to Greece to start a new life. They spread a strongly desired global mindset by carrying professional, social and personal skills.

Usually, the returners and the nomads choose to shelter their activities in co-working spaces, like the creative hub Stone Soup, because of the limitless networking potential and the inspiration one such dynamic environment may offer.

The effects of brain drain are quite visible in our daily practice, but should we despair?

Daphne was introduced to us as a talented, young professional looking for opportunities abroad. She has spent six months in Paris, at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines with the Erasmus programme, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Mass Media from the University of Athens (UOA) and a Master’s Degree in Computer Animation and VFX from the University of Dundee.

Daphne is a passionate and determined person driven by her passion and ambition to distinguish in her profession. She has a broad range of interests and skills that she acquired during her education or she was self-taught, such as illustration, concept and comic art and 2D & 3D animation and she is already acknowledged for her work in some of these. In 2017 she illustrated a children’s book written by Cleopatra Deliou, a lecturer of Athens University of Economics and Business, and she released her own comic in Comicdom Athens Convention called “Requiem in Deep Blue”.

Both experiences were very important to build her confidence as an artist and gain constructive feedback to help her improve creatively and to build her network. A few months after graduating, Daphne returned to Greece, while seeking positions worldwide, in concept art, character design and animation, with the long-term plan to direct animation films. Asking for career advices she ended up at Stone Soup where she had the opportunity to network and to cowork on some freelance projects.

Daphne considers Stone Soup as an environment where global job possibilities come up all the time through getting to know all kinds of freelancers and you may find yourself committed in ongoing or future projects very naturally. Thus, she came to realisation that going abroad is not the only choice, because there are places for people to perform and network in an international setting in Greece too.

So if you are planning to leave Greece…

We hope we gave you enough reasons why you might want to drop by and check what is simmering for you here!

If interested you can reach here Daphne’s portfolio and LinkedIn profile.