In May 2005 Hans Hallberg was on a business trip to New York, and during a walk through Central Park he found the Swedish Cottage, a cabin from Sweden in the middle of a wonderful park in one of the centers of the world.
What Hans found most interesting about it was the almost complete lack of Swedish culture, theater, music, art - almost everything.
He has started a private initiative to make Sweden and the cottages history more known, with events like Swedish Day in Central Park, and swedish stories for the marionette theater.
One of the people he had meetings with was Andrea Newman (pictured), director of corporate partnerships with the CityParks Foundation.
By putting up informational signs you can tell everything. A world map showing where Sweden is, and its larger cities and interesting places. About Swedish history (vikings, kings and development), population (Laps, Sames etc), famous men/women in sports (Ingemar Stenmark, Björn Borg, Börje Salming, Peter Sundin), music (ABBA, Roxette, Cardigans, Millencolin, Robyn), film (Lena Olin, Peter Stormare, Ingemar Bergman, Lasse Hallström), books (Astrid Lindgren, Wilhelm Moberg, August Strindberg), companies (Volvo, Saab, H&M) and inventions (dynamite, zipper, spanner, computer mouse).
To become one of those helping to get Sweden to the huge amount of people passing through Central Park each day, you should contact us and tell us what you have to offer.
We are interested in all types of suggestions in swedish creations, culture and the Swedish history. There are so many with Swedish heritage in the US, and there is a great interest in Sweden there.
We are also looking for people who can handle meeting places like this, and create the goodwill that we are seeking, both for Sweden and Central Park, but most of all for the visitor.
We wish to work planning ahead, with monthly/quarterly/seasonal activities to create security for those working with the events, and for visitors planning their visits ahead of time.
This is a private non-profit initiative, and we want you to contact us to help bring more of Sweden to the US. We can all be ambassadeurs of Sweden!
To read more, download this Word-document. Right-click and choose "save as" to make sure you download it to your computer.