One to watch: Yes We Can—a portrait of four GRL/UCF students in a FryslânDOK series

Four international Bachelor’s students of Global Responsibility & Leadership in Leeuwarden share a home and a passion to contribute to a better world. Follow the lives of these young future-makers in Yes We Can, a FryslânDOK series full of contagious young ambition, friendship, and personal growth. It will air on NPO2 and Omrop Fryslân in October 2022.

Līna from Latvia, Linnea and Lea from Germany, and Mariana from Portugal live together in a student house in Leeuwarden. It is a small community, just like that of University College Fryslân at the University of Groningen/Campus Fryslân: small-scale, with a lot of personal attention. Next door lives documentary maker Annet Huisman, who, when she meets her special neighbours, decides to follow them. A note in her letter box gets the story rolling further.

The four young women are studying Global Responsibility & Leadership at University College Fryslân, part of the UG/Campus Fryslân. This Bachelor’s degree programme has been around for five years now and has risen from newcomer to best-rated programme in the Dutch Higher Education Guide (Keuzegids) 2022. The Bachelor’s programme is inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and is an interdisciplinary programme, in which students study global issues and look for local solutions. Students are equipped with perseverance plus a good dose of idealism and a positive outlook in order to contribute to the SDGs. A lot of hard work and discussion is involved. Art is also deployed, to be able to look at global challenges from a different perspective and to arouse a feeling about them.

In the meantime, the world goes on. The coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine have not left these students unmoved. In personal vlogs, they give a candid insight into their driven, inquisitive, and intellectual but still down-to-earth universe: there is a lot of laughter. In the three episodes of Yes We Can, we get to know Leeuwarden’s international students Līna, Linnea, Lea, and Mariana. The zest with which they and their fellow students face the great mission of creating a better world makes our hearts hopeful.

FryslânDOK is mostly in English with Dutch subtitles.