GLAD 20 YEARS - Flipbook - Page 46
People’s Festival
and Collective
Efforts
2013 became the year when the Glad Foundation focussed on increasing visibility and profile
towards potential partners and initiated communities in relevant fora within social economy.
To this end, the democratic People’s Festival on the island of Bornholm is the perfect arena. Glad
Foundation participated for the first time – with considerable presence of Glad Foundation, theatre
and TV.
Participation was successful on several parameters and lead to association and cooperation with
three socio-economic businesses. In 2016, the three set up The Social-Economic Municipal Prize,
which is awarded annually at the People’s Festival to a Danish municipality, which in the past year
has done something special to improve conditions for socio-economic businesses.
A young Maria Quitzau came along on Glad’s first trip to Bornholm in the summer of 2013. Here
she had one of her life’s most memorable experiences, when she spoke to thousands of people from
the festival’s public Speaker’s Corner, and Maria spoke from her heart:
“I had to take a deep breath, but then I did it,” Maria remembers. She continues to explain how she
took the floor to speak of a cause, which means everything to her.
“I spoke about seeing darkness and opening up to the unknown – in short, disabled people! And
just imagine … that so many people listened to what I had to say. And I was taken seriously. Very often
my experience is that I am misunderstood,” says Maria Quitzau, who has since become a courageous
spokeswoman for people with Down syndrome, even abroad. In 2018 she appeared on British ITV in
a programme about new research in the field.
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