If you’ve been using public Facebook pages for expats in your home city, we have a better idea.
WELCOME TO THE EXPAT LIFESTYLE
A year after we founded Dispatches Europe in the Netherlands, we’re rolling out Passport, our integrated social media platform. (Kudos to the amazing Lizette van Boom and Wim Feijen at Go2People Websites in Amsterdam for doing the heavy lifting.)
We’re the first major news and entertainment site to give you – English-speaking expats across Europe – a place to connect and make the most of the international lifestyle, a social-media platform integrated into our news and entertainment website.
Many expats only seek to connect with people in their cities … we get that.
But let’s say you’re moving from Paris to Berlin, a common occurrence. You’re going to need an entire new life-support network.
So, we’ve created groups for expats to connect in:
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf, Geneva, Copenhagen, Prague, Lisbon, Paris, Vienna, Eindhoven, Stockholm, Berlin, and Brussels.
We’ll add cities as readers recommend.
And, of course, we’ll try to do whatever you ask us to do within the bounds of reality, legality, and general decency.
Build your life-support network with Passport
Dispatches’ audience is an audience on the move, people who need things quickly including jobs, an apartment, health care options and schools. So Passport forums focus on housing, careers, travel, quality of life and other topics. This is just the beginning.
Our core mission is facilitating the global mobility of talent.
Why? Because there’s a talent war going on from The Valley to Cluj, Romania. Expanding industrialized economies need international talent because they can’t grow their own quickly enough whether you’re talking about our headquarters country of the Netherlands, China or Dubai.
So, we’ll aggregate as much content as possible about career opportunities, and we hope you’ll add to the mix.
You can use Passport for anything, basically: finding a doc in your new city; pitching your Eindhoven startup to potential investors in Berlin; crowd-sourcing where to find the best Indian food in Europe; getting hotel recommendations for Stockholm, Sofia or the Côte d’Azur.
Finally, we have an events calendar, so send us your group’s events and we’ll get them posted ASAP. ([email protected])
All you have to do is sign up. (You can see our privacy policy here.)
We are the world, so to speak
This platform isn’t just for expats already in Europe. This is for aspirational expats still in the United States, India, Dubai, China or wherever who are looking for new opportunities in Europe, or who are in the process of resettling.
So, we’re inviting you to use our SM platform for free as a safe environment where you can search for an apartment, buy and sell, find a new doctor, figure out the transportation network and trade information about careers. Whatever. It’s all yours … and don’t forget to invite your friends.
Of course, we monitor Passport to keep the user experience fun and rewarding for everyone; i.e., no hate speech, harassment and – you know – don’t get us arrested.
We’re not your mom … we’re not going to smack your knuckles for cussing, but free speech has its limits. Just use good manners and be respectful of others.
Maybe treat others as you’d want to be treated?
