Haakon and Mette-Marit goes back to the future

Maud Of Norway

Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit have started a competition for 14-16 year olds in Norway for their Humanitarian Foundation. The purpose of the competition is to get the younger and the older generations talking to each other; for a teenager to talk to the grandparent generation and to ask about a happening in their life that meant a lot to them.

Mette-Marit says to NTB: “We’ve had the idea concerning such a competition for a long time. We’ve met many fantastic young and older people in this country, but we’ve also seen the need for places where they can gather together, and an increased contact between the generations.”

Crown Prince Haakon says that he thinks it is a misconception that teenagers are only concerned with what happens to them, that they’re also concerned for others, and that the competition is a way to hear about the things that happened to their grandparents, or other older people, when they were young, and what advice they might have for the teenagers.

Both Haakon and Mette-Marit has shared videos on the website for the competition. In the videos, they tell stories of people they have met from their grandparent generation and what it meant to them. Crown Prince Haakon tells us of all the questions he wished he’d asked of his grandfather, King Olav (in the picture above, with his mother, Queen Maud). Mette-Marit shares the story of an older British man she met in Singapore, when she was coming back from her year in Australia, and a conversation they struck up because they both were reading the same book.

In the NTB story, Crown Prince Haakon mentions the difference between having grandparents who went abroad during WWII, but also grandparents who stayed home, and talking to his maternal grandmother about what happened in Norway during the war.

The entries will be to tell the old story in a new way, ie. by using a new medium. The winners will be revealed on the Crown Princely couple’s wedding anniversary in August.

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