++ Champions of Eos Cares ++
Louise Bideau arrived in Lund right before the end of the year 2020, to perform a 7-month full time internship with Eos Cares as part of her political science education at Sciences Po Rennes. She was quickly thrown into the fire. When the second wave of covid-restrictions struck in november 2020, we had decided to move our language cafés online, in an attempt to continue offering opportunities to practice language conversation - despite the online format being far from ideal. Surprisingly, visitors kept joining, and up until Christmas we still had a solid group of 20-30 participants checking in twice per week.
Our Language Café Manager at that time, Mohammad Ridwan, had done a spectacular job setting up the zoom platform, but as his Swedish Institute Scholarship came to an end by the end of the year, he went back to Indonesia to start his work career. The keys were handed over to Louise, freshly arrived from France, barely installed in Lund, but in great spirits and ready to contribute. The twice-per-week online Eos Language Café became one of our program’s biggest success stories, and visitors kept connecting all throughout the spring, until we finally switched to physical sessions in June 2021. Until this day we have not heard of any other language café staying alive and active through online sessions for that long of a time period. This was Louise’s first contribution, but for her internship it was only the beginning.
During her stay with us, she participated in almost all of our work groups, contributing greatly to the developments of our Communication Team, Language Accelerator, Prisma Pop-up activities, Language Tandem Program - where she engaged a little community of French learners of her own - and eventually enabled us to define a new role “HR Manager”, where her responsibility was to overview our entire english-speaking program, look after the wellbeing of our interns, and suggest improvements based on their requests, interests and developments.
And by the way, two months into her internship, she was suddenly speaking fluent Swedish.
Louise, know that you will be missed! But also that you are handing over a program in great shape - your work has contributed to making Eos Cares bigger, stronger, and more sustainable than ever. We wish you the best of luck with your future life challenges and your upcoming master’s degree. And when time is due we hope to meet again.
++ Also want to become a champion? It all starts here.