How attending a three-week sustainability course in Berlin shifted into a three-year journey through mentorship, what happens when fifty people from thirteen countries live and learn together, and why the right community changes everything.

Core insights:

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United World Colleges is a global movement that makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. That sentence appears on their website. I have read it many times. But sentences like that only start meaning something after you have lived inside them for a while.

The UWC BASF Short Course, Building a Sustainable Future, has a tradition going back multiple years. When I look back on it now, I realise that being given the chance to attend helped me find something I had been looking for without knowing how to name it.

November 2021 marks my first encounter with this subject matter. After attending six online lectures on sustainability, zero waste, and the climate crisis, I became familiar, for the first time in the actual sense, with the seriousness of these topics. Not the distant seriousness you read about. The kind that settles into your thinking and refuses to leave.

The following summer, I attended the in-person course. From July 25th to August 13th, 2022, over fifty participants from more than thirteen countries gathered in Berlin to rethink sustainability in its complexity. We attended workshops, guest lectures, and community events. We developed our own sustainability projects. We shared cultures and opinions shaped by entirely different worlds.

Spending time at the venue, isolated from the world for three weeks, felt like a peaceful escape. But it was not an escape. It was a concentration. I gained understanding of issues I had never really thought about, yet which turned out to be crucial ones. Together with other participants, the idea of creating a platform dedicated to activism was born.

On a personal level, I started implementing minimalism in multiple aspects of my life. I began noticing things I had never noticed before and focusing on what is actually valuable. I learned to value people more, to be more compassionate, but also to value myself more.

We often underestimate our own worth. We rarely see how many ways we have helped or influenced the lives of people around us. The course did not teach me this directly. It created conditions where I could finally notice it.

After the short course, an additional one-year fellowship phase is organized. Participants create their own sustainability projects and receive support from mentors. For two consecutive years, I returned as one of those mentors.

The first year, I worked with a Spanish team building an app that provides sustainability scores for products by scanning barcodes. My role included guidance, technical support, and check-up meetings. It was the first time I had to translate what I knew into something useful for someone else's vision. That translation is its own skill entirely.

The second year brought Roberto Mutzette, an Italian student in Denmark. His initiative, Mentor4You, connects mentors and mentees across different project areas. What impressed me most was his relentless drive.

I asked him to list questions before our next meeting. Within minutes, I received a detailed list covering every aspect of his vision. During a call, I told him to give me two minutes to prepare a solution. Before I finished speaking, he was already researching hosting providers.

His energy and curiosity were exactly the kind of leadership UWC fosters.

I am endlessly grateful for becoming part of such a community. But if we aspire toward creating a better world, we should expand this safe space to a much larger scale. So our world itself, one day, becomes a safe space for all of us.

That is what UWC taught me. Not sustainability as a checklist. Not activism as performance. But the quiet belief that when the right people find each other, something shifts. And sometimes that shift carries you through the years that follow.

Until next time,