At the end of May, 24 students, – half from Romania and half from Italy- went to give food to poor people in Cluj Napoca.
This was part of the project “O masă caldă”, which was organized by some students from FSPAC. They worked in partnership with Super Citizen.
In order to follow the project, students discovered a different aspect of Cluj Napoca by other activities such as a workshop, a touristic tour, and a cultural event.
Madalina Hodorog is the coordinator of the Super Citizen: “During the project we will have activities based on volunteering, civic citizenship, ecology, we will tell participants where to find new opportunities for going abroad, develop themselves and find new aspects of the world,” she said.
With Călin – Tudor Crețu, they run “Civic Citizen for my CommEUnity” (also called Super Citizen). Its goal is to help students from Romania and Italy to improve their community and themselves, by knowing their rights as European youth citizens.
Hodorog had the idea of making an European project while watching a video clip. During the flood in Romania, the police had a lot of work to do. People were laughing at the policemen while they were helping out the community. Together with Crețu, Hodorog got upset. They wanted to change something in their society.
To make Civic Citizen comes to live, Hodorog and Cretu applied at the European scholarship.
“We had the idea and put it in practice with the help of the Center for the Study of Democracy, an NGO from Cluj-Napoca, from FSPAC. Along with 2 friends from the NGO we applied for a Youth in Action grant in October 2013” said Hodorog.
During the civic week, Hodorog and Cretu received daily feedbacks and worked on them everyday. At the end, the 24 students were generally happy to become a Super Citizen.
With Crețu, they have an important value of volunteering. It helps to give others and to find out about yourself, to become a more confident person. They believe they have plenty of opportunities to involve their society, it is only a matter of taking them. For their week of civic activities, they had the support of three students in journalism.
“They had the attitude and the motivation to participate.”, Hodorog said, “they have also been in very few voluntary activities so took them under our “umbrella” and me and Calin are really thankful to their devotion.”