3SI Hearts and Minds Campaign Attempt

An interesting event happened in Warsaw on 18 September, the Three Seas Generation Freedom Conference (GENFREE) hosted by the ‘State of Poland Foundation’. The Conference concerned many areas including business and politics and had guests of a vast array of profiles.

This conference was not well known and Visegrad Insight’s request to participate was denied by the organisers due to there not being enough space; however, sources from the conference confirmed there were still many available seats. It is worth noting that ‘journalists’ are a group they mention wanting to reach in their report. 

In the run-up to the conference, a Facebook advert from the foundation was going around the 3SI region asking younger people from the region to send in an essay on the topic of ‘My Country — an Amazing Story’; the winners of this contest as a prize could attend the GENFREE conference and a chance to be hired as full-time journalists at this new organisation.

This little known, exclusive gathering was organised by a relatively unknown organisation funded by the Polish government known as ‘The State of Poland’ which is headed by Włodzimierz Dola, who used to work for the Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (National Development Bank) (BGK) and was also appointed to be the head of the national stadium in Warsaw. The only other two partners of the event were the BGK and the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The meeting was meant to go along with a report written about the Three Seas Initiative and the need for message dissemination.