“My Big Fat Greek Brunch” - June 10th, 2012

• Venue: Hellenic Centre of Brussels, St. Gilles – BRUSSELS

“EasySundays Fashion Brunch” - June 17th, 2012

• Venue: NACWC Headquarters, 16/R NW – WASHINGTON DC

Stay tuned for more info! In the meantime, you can have a look at the previous event photos by joining our Facebook Group and following us on Twitter.

It was most definitely one of the biggest EasySundays crowds ever – with 95 people in attendance! We are so pleased to have been able to raise so much to support GAMS in their very important work and thank everyone for coming.

A special thanks to Kanodou for being our host – the venue and the food was excellent!

Have a look at the photos from teh event on our Facebook Group, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and tweet about your thoughts on the event. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

More about the cause: GAMS Belgium was founded in 1996 to fight against female genital mutilation. These mutilations affect women and young girls from several countries, primarily Subsaharan Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and have a dramatic impact on their physical health, mental health, sexuality and family life. GAMS organises many activities with the objective to provide: information, workshops, training and campaign support.

First of all, for our first-transatlantic brunch endeavor to have even been possible, we would like to thank our amazing partner GFWC District of Columbia Woman’s Club for hosting us at their beautiful headquarters and for making everything between baking, set-up, mimosa pouring and clean-up an absolute dream! You are amazing women!

A big thanks also goes to Lisa Schwartz from INMED Partnerships for Children for speaking about INMED’s work. We are so proud to say that 100% of the funds collected at the brunch will go towards the implementation of a new Aquaponics unit for the “Healthy Children, Healthy Futures” project in South Africa to provide sustainable food for children whose lives have been directly affected by AIDS and HIV.

Pudumo Primary school is one of twenty schools in Orange Farm, outside of Johannesburg in Gauteng province, where INMED currently serve 10,000 school aged kids. INMED helped them build a school garden two years ago, added a water catchment system last year and is now in the process of installing the aquaponics unit.

What are Aquaponics? Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture (fish cultivation) and hydroponic vegetable production in a closed system that uses approximately 85-90% less water than traditional agriculture, and produces roughly 10 times as much in the same space. This means the children will have fish for their school meal, which is the only real meal most of these children get every day, as well as vegetables.

They will also learn about an adaptive form of agriculture, which recirculates the nutrient-rich water from the fish to fertilize the vegetables while the vegetable beds, which contain gravel rather than soil, filter, clean and oxygenate the water, which is returned to the fish tank.  This completely organic system can be implemented on a small scale in urban areas, and on a larger scale for small farmers.  INMED has developed a low-cost, modular, easy-to-maintain form of aquaponics.

Construction at Pudumo Primary School is expected to be complete in May. A desktop aquaponics unit is also being put in the school to teach the kids how to run them and possibly build them at home (and also learn some biology!).

We very much look forward to following the progress of INMED’s South African aquaponics project. It was amazing to learn about how this technology can make such a difference in providing food for children and families as well as household income.

From left: Christina Crawley, EasySundays; Lisa Schwartz, INMED; and Ingrid Peterson, GFWC District of Columbia Woman’s Club.

Again, a huge thank you to everyone who attended our first brunch in Washington, D.C. If you would like to hear more about EasySundays, attend future events, suggest charities to support or even host an event, please contact us.

As our first brunch of 2012, EasySundays invited you to tantilise your tastebuds with delicious treats from the Americas from North to South. For this special brunch, we will re-supported our friends at the Escuela Democratica de Huamachuco in Peru.

From Canadian maple syrup and pancakes to American cupcakes and cookies, sweet Caribbean plantains, Latin American tacos, Brazilian pao de queijos and Peruvian ceviche… there was something cooking for all foodie enthusiasts on March 4th!

Many thanks to the 60 people who joined us in support of a school that has become very important to us all over the last three years. Information to follow on the school’s progress and where WestSideSunday’s support is going.

About the cause: La Escuela Democratica de Huamachuco.

The Escuela Democratica de Huamachucho is Peru’s first democratic school (what is a democratic school?). EasySundays has supported the school since 2009 to help with the building of the school itself. Huamachucho is located in a very remote area and in one of the poorest regions of the country. It has been a pleasure to follow the school’s progress over the last three years, watching as walls and doors go up, more and more children gain access to this unique approach to learning and how the community has come together for their children. For this reason, we are very proud to support the Escuela Democratica for our first EasySundays brunch of 2012. Learn more about the school’s programme (in Spanish).

The last brunch of 2011 took place on November 27th at the La Maison de la Solidarite, 133 rue du Viaduc, 1050 Ixelles. On the menu was:

• Festive & seasonal home-made food
• Hot Wine; fair-trade coffee; a fair-trade juice bar
• A special solidaritea & oriental pastries corner
• Live ITALIAN pasta show, cooked on the spot by our guest cooks!
• An Icelandic a capella choir

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This season was about sharing….So we collected funds for two different causes!

1. The Swedish/Tanzanian association Yatima heart to heart, www.yatima.se to help with the food-supply to orphan children in a childrens’home in the village of Bumilayinga, located 650km away from Dar es Salaam.

2. Samusocial.be. We will be supporting the emergency housing center for people in great need. 215 persons in need live here from single people to whole families.

Thank you so much to all those who came out to support these two great causes. If you’d like to contribute even more, get in touch with us to give away things you may not need anymore but many could: e.g. clothes, toys, literature (FR, NL), non-perishable food, etc.

As always, the EasySundays did its best to make its brunches as sustainable as possible. As much as we can, we used seasonal and local fruits and vegetables, organic and fair trade products.

Thanks to all those who helped us in this regard as well as supporting these two wonderful groups.

We certainly managed to tease and satisfy your palates with seasonal and local fruits and vegetables, inspired by the award-winning Campaign ‘Manger local et de saison‘ of Bruxelles environnement.

The proceeds of this event went to the Swedish/Tanzanian association Yatima www.yatima.se, active in the Iringa District of southwest Tanzania, in the villages of Matanana, Bumilayinga and Ulole, 650km away from Dar es Salaam.

These villages are largely affected by HIV. Many children are orphan and live under very poor conditions.

Yatima has set up and maintains day-care centers to give children the chance to a childhood without removing them from their social context. For the children the day-care centers mean security, food, shelter and education.

The Yatima project also sustains an organic farm as a means of securing the food supply for its activities.

Thanks to all of you who joined us – it was a great success!

As EasySundays is also about networking, we also gave out flyers and information about EasySundays at the European Job Days Brussels that took place on Saturday 1st October at the Berlaymont-Schuman.

The European Job Day Brussels is a recruitment event where you can meet up to 40 employers and have on the spot interviews for jobs.

It’s also a unique opportunity to access practical information on all aspects of mobility in Europe and to create your own job. Learn more: www.jobdays.eu.

To mark our 2 years, we held a birthday brunch at The Hub to support a great local cause, Clair de Clown on April 17th.

Clair de Clown is all about being there for others, and so we thought it was a perfect birthday gift for EasySundays – which is all about getting people together and giving an extra helping hand to such great charities that could really benefit from additional support.

About the charity, Clair de Clown:
“Le rire c’est la vie, c’est pouvoir continuer quoiqu’il arrive, avec espoir et courage.”
Clair de Clown is a local NGO that goes to homes and hospitals to spend time with children and the elderly to provide warm company and friendly smiles to those with medical difficulties.

About the venue, The Hub:
The Hub “A coworking members space for people acting to create a better world.”
The Hub is a space-based and online community for change makers to access the knowledge and tools they need to build solutions for social and environmental impact. Located across 5 continents and locally in the heart of Brussels, the Hub provides sustainably designed coworking spaces, events focused on social innovation and professional tools that help members reach their goals faster, surrounded by a community that makes everyone smarter and more effective.

Music? Of course!
For this special occasion we had both our EasySundays resident DJ A, pumping out amazing tunes as usual as well as a little live Jazz by Michelle Mildiner and Mark Baxter.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who came out for the last EasySundays event of 2010!

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On 5 December, EasySundays provided four exciting wines from New Zealand, Australia and Chile to put some smiles on childrens’ faces in Cambodia! It was a great turnout – so thanks to all!

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The wine: All wines were provided and presented by Max at Crush wine. Have a look at his shop just off Place du Luxembourg: 39 rue Caroly, B-1050 Bruxelles. What we tasted: Lindauer Sparking Brut (NZ)  – WHITE; The Ned Sauvignon Blanc (NZ) – WHITE; Bremerton Mathilda Plains (AUS) Cabernet Shiraz – RED; and, Indomita Chilean Carmenere – RED.

The venue: Le Cercle des Voyageurs, 18 rue des Grandes Carmes, 1000 Brussels.

The charity: All proceeds from the event went to Pour un sourire d’unfant, Cambodia.

More about the NGO  Pour un Sourire d’Enfant:

Created in 1993 the NGO, Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (For the smile of a child) provides education to children that live in extremely poor and harsh conditions in Cambodia. The NGO started by bringing meals to the garbage dumps where children worked day and night with nothing but what they found in the dump to take ton their mouths. Today PSE has set up 6 schools in different cities of Cambodia and provides free and quality education, as well as meals, health care and even housing for more than 6000 children a day. It’s important to remember the terrible recent history of Cambodia where the Pol Pot regime left as legacy many broken families. PSE is helping these families start again , and any help is welcomed and truly appreciated by these smiling children.

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