BeWelcome News

Not longer than eight weeks BeWelcome ago asked its members for donations. Now the 2000 Euro goal has already been reached. This is the shortest donation campaign I can remember. A BIIIIG "Thank you" to everybody who donated money to enable us to pay for the costs like servers, obligatory insurances etc.
Please: Next time you will see the donation bar on the front page (which will be in the beginning of next year) please consider donating yourself ;)

And if you do not have any money to spare…

A BeWelcome member who wants to stay anonymous recently donated 1000 Euro - the highest donation so far!
We reached out to this member and this is what came back:

"I am a long-term supporter and user of BeWelcome, and it always fills me with joy to meet fellow hosts and guests through this wonderful platform. These days I am a little busy with work, so I chose to make a financial contribution to the - very modest - costs of the project.
I admire the ongoing commitment the volunteers give to the…

You might have noticed that the donation bar is now visible once you log in to BeWelcome. As every year the annual donation campaign has started.

BeWelcome needs about 2000 Euros to cover its expenses this year. This is not a lot of money for a community of more than 100.000 members. Do not even try to compare it with donation campaigns by other websites like Wikipedia who asked for almost 8 million Euros during the past weeks. BeWelcome works on the lowest monetary budget possible thanks to the…

Last Weekend (18.+19. November 2017) the annual General Assembly of BeVolunteer - the association behind BeWelcome - took place in Lille / Northern France. Eight Volunteers have met there in real life, several others took part online - and quite some important decisions have been taken.

One of the decisions: As every year the new Board of Directors has been elected. 

BeVolunteer now has a new secretary: A warm welcome to Frauenschuh!
He is also actively volunteering in the Support Team.

The new…

"Testing is like searching for truffles", a friend of mine once described it: You walk in a beautiful surrounding and then suddenly stumble upon something that is irritating.

We are all looking forward to our new website. The redesign is going on and advancing ... but nothing can be put online without proper testing beforehand. And the more people test it, the more bugs or inconsistencies will be noticed. 

If you have an hour or two to spare and want to play around with the future look of…

Do you want to be on top of scientific research about hospitality exchange and accomodation sharing?

Our member Luciez has included BeWelcome in her study on the sustainability potentials of the sharing economy, which you can find here: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/8055286

Now she continues her research and sent me An invitation to dinner and focus group on accommodation sharing in London:

BeWelcome is not a dating site. But sometimes it happens that likeminded members meet and find out that there is more between them than just sharing a lifestyle, common interests, and hobbies. Sometimes unplanned things happen – for example that two members fall in love. This is called life.

While still living in Munich artep https://www.bewelcome.org/members/artep liked to go hiking in the Alps. She posted several suggestions of hikes in the Munich group https://www.bewelcome.org/groups/288 and…

It is very cool that the member Franck Maya took up the challenge and organizes in Rennes in the north-west of France, a whole weekend full of activities for BeWelcome members and the whole hospitality exchange community.

He picked up the by now almost traditional title of a BeWelcome meeting and calles it "Seek The Stoat - Seek The Bigoudène". Up to you non native speakers to find out what that means ;)

Here you find more information about the program:
https://www.bewelcome.org/activities/1842

…

Every year there has to be a General Assembly (GA) of BeVolunteer, the association behind BeWelcome. In 2017 the actual meeting part of the GA will take place November 18 + 19 in Lille/France (other parts are conducted online). You can find activities organized in Lille around the General Assembly  here. Of course the program will be more detailed closer to the date.

The Board of Directors would like to invite you to take part in discussions about the future of BeWelcome. Attending is possible…

Our member survey announced here on June 18th is now finished and a summary of results can be viewed and downloaded at

https://downloads.bewelcome.org/surveys/2017_BW_Member_Survey.pdf

We want to thank everyone who helped prepare and analyse the survey - and the 851 members who took the time to complete it.

Some of the main findings are that most members join BeWelcome for hosting, staying with locals, cultural exchange and because it is non-profit. Almost all respondents actually did travel…