Hannele Känd, who served as a guide and team lead at the Tallinn Business Incubator and also conducted Kopli Food Tours, shares her thoughts on her experience as a volunteer at the festival. Read her thoughts:
My Open House Tallinn this year consisted of two major pillars. As usual, I am part of the special program with my tours in the Kopli area, and otherwise, I try to help out wherever I can. So, I had reserved Saturday for the business incubator and left Sunday open in case I needed to respond quickly on short notice. I actually enjoy challenging myself in situations where you have to jump right in on an object, piece information together on the fly, and present it. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), I didn’t have to do that kind of quick reaction this time, so I was able to spend Sunday in the awesome and beautiful incubator as well.
We had a great team of volunteers at the Incubator, and it was a real pleasure working together – thank you Brit, Niina, Kristiina, Annika, Allan, and the incubator staff who welcomed us. We smoothly handled unexpected situations, such as materials and OHT cubes that hadn’t arrived yet, a barricade of shoes in front of the one door we definitely needed to enter for the tour, or unexpected views out the window when laundry appeared to dry in the courtyard of an extremely dilapidated (and at first glance abandoned) house. All of this was effortlessly and joyfully woven into the tours, and a total of 190 people visited us.
What I personally liked the most was the pleasant sense of peace that washed over me while walking around the building. That peace gave space for thoughts, and several really cool ideas came up to pursue in the future.
The second part of my OHT was the Kopli tours, which were especially delicious this time – simply because they were nearly 4-hour food tours! Many thanks to my dear co-guide Liine, with whom we’ve tried many a load of shashlik and pies to best convey food architecture and history.
The only minor downside was that I didn’t manage to visit any other OHT sites myself – but that’s the volunteer life for you. And I have no regrets!
