The IIRE's big move

• Greater flexibility. In the 1980s the IIRE held its own courses six months a year, and for the most part our meeting rooms and bedrooms were not much used the other six months while the staff were preparing the next course. In recent years our courses have been shorter, and we have rented the building much of the time to other progressive organizations. Our Timorplein premises are being renovated so as to make it possible to hold our own activities in one part, host outside events in a second part, rent our bedrooms to yet other groups when we do not need them ourselves, welcome researchers to our library, all without having one set of activities interfere with the other.

• Synergy with partners. We will co-own Timorplein 21, a former technical school, with several other institutions whose activities will complement our own. The Dutch not-for-profit hostel chain Stayokay will have a 450-bed hostel in the same complex; this will allow us to rent bedrooms from Stayokay when we need them for large-scale gatherings, while renting out our own bedrooms through Stayokay when they are empty. Participants in our courses and events will also be able to take advantage of the three Kriterion theatres (two of them for films) in the complex as well as a restaurant, café and Internet café. Kindred institutions like the International Institute for Social History and the International Archive and Information Centre for the Women's Movement will be within walking distance.

• Better equipment. The new space will have more, bigger and better-eqipped meeting rooms than our current building and glass fibre Internet access.

• A more appropriate setting. Comfortable as we have been on the Willemsparkweg, the Vondelpark area is not one where many progressive social organizations are based. The Timorplein, in the borough of Zeeburg in eastern Amsterdam, is in a more economically and ethnically mixed neighbourhood, though an upgrading process is currently under way. Our neighbours there will be more the kind of people that participants in our courses work with in their home countries.

• Greater financial security. After all these years, as we have been warning our supporters, major equipment at our Willemsparkweg location (such as our stove, heating furnaces and hot water heaters) requires replacing, at costs that we cannot afford. The increased value of real estate in the Vondelpark area enables us to sell our current building at a price that will fully cover the costs of buying, renovating and equipping the Timorplein space We are confident that rental income at the new location will increase substantially. This will put us on a sounder financial footing to face the coming decades.