Integration Workshop (Integrationswerkstatt)Nonprofit, volunteer-led intercultural social service hub, bicycle repair workshop, café and meetingplace

Integrationswerkstatt is a massive new non-profit refugee integration project in the community of Unkel, Germany, providing residents – recent refugees and long-standing Unkelers alike – a central meetingplace and a social service hub for bureaucratic and personal assistance.

Integrationswerkstatt began as a means of providing self-reliance and independence to a broad range of refugees and other residents in times of hardship, in an environmentally and physically healthy activity: bicycling. Giving community members the space and skills to repair their own bikes starts as a boon to the individual, but benefits the entire community, increasing the physical wellbeing and safety of all as refugees learn the rules of the road and become more physically active, and creating a social space for integration between refugees and locals. It also provides access to the job market through internships and proof of training,

Since the project’s inception, it has expanded to include a broad range of integration activities, such as language courses, translation, counseling, sport fields, community garden, café, non-denominational worship space to foster inter-religious friendship, and a multilingual library.

The Integrationswerkstatt provides refugees a means of social engagement not built on charity, while providing to German society with security and sustainability:

Security: Economic prosperity and social engagement are two of the top proven tools in the fight against extremism, and this project works to provide refugees with both.

Sustainability: The bike is the greenest mode of transit, and self-repair is sustainable.

In March 2017, local non-profit organization Gemeinsam für Vielfalt received the support of the community’s Mayors to run the Integrationswerkstatt on Unkel’s 5.7 acre former swimming pool space, a central location in the community, accessible to all residents, equipped with grill space, soccer, volleyball, and basketball courts, and multiple buildings, all of which has stood unused for over a decade. Repurposing this visible disused space is another boon to Unkel.

The project is an effort toward integration, increased economic opportunity, and combatting prejudices and radicalism in both refugee and German communities. Refugees will have an ownership and management stake equal to their German neighbors, and long-term this should offer a model to be used throughout countries seeking to integrate refugees into their societies.

Despite community support, undertaking the Integrationswerkstatt program on a reasonable scale requires significant economic and volunteer support. The project’s initial sponsorships have come primarily through US citizens wishing to assist refugees at a time when their political leaders are making it difficult to do so. As a registered nonprofit in Germany, donations may be tax deductible, and Integrationswerkstatt and the government of Unkel are very willing to work with donors to maximize good press, from events to interviews in multiple languages.

Benefits to Refugees and the Community

Breaking into the workforce in Germany is incredibly difficult for foreigners. The refugees in the project will gain skills and certifications as a first step to access the German job market.

Those who help teach others how to repair their bicycles will be trained by professional associations. In these trainings, not only will they learn vital skills, but also documentation of their training, proving experience with technical work in Germany. Additionally, those who regularly work in the workspace as monitors and assistants will receive documentation of the work as an internship.

Community Garden allows refugees to handle German soil, developing metaphorical roots, while offering training (and certification) in gardening practices by professionals.

Those who work in the café/bistro will require a hygiene certificate from the local health authority, will learn restaurant skills and will also receive internship documentation.

Additionally, for those who cannot yet safely ride a bike or have not yet mastered the German traffic/safety regulations, the workshop space can also be used to practice. For schoolchildren, actual traffic safety trainings have been organized with local police and emergency services.

The workshop space can be used in the Summer and Spring as a space for all community members to come together for sports, free play, and festivals.

Goals

• Mobility

• Safe bikers on public roads

• Professional, instructional, and Do-It-Yourself competence

• Personal responsibility and pride

• Connection to the land and the community

• Certification and documentation of job skills and training

• Creating a partly-refugee-run organization to foster integration, cooperation, and partnerships between old and new residents

Socially-minded bicycle shops are prevalent in Germany, but only as repair shops where those in need can leave bikes to be repaired by professionals. The Integrationswerkstatt board have discussed the details of running such a project with these other groups in order to inform the project. The training, self-sufficiency, and partial-refugee-ownership of this project are unique to the Integration Workshop, and while certain regulations such as insurance will be different, the layout of the bicycle-repair project and space can be based on preexisting projects.

The Integrationswerkstatt project seeks to provide a sustainable civil-society-led integration model for other difficult locations.

Gemeinsam für Vielfalt – Nonprofit parent organization

On June 27, 2017, residents of Unkel founded the organization Gemeinsam für Vielfalt e.V. for the purposes of officially undertaking the Integrationswerkstatt program. They were granted nonprofit status by the German government in October, 2017. The organization’s founding board is made of an equal number of refugees and non-refugees, a near-equal number of men and women, with Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Alawite and Jewish members from Germany, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and the USA.

“Incorporating refugee-run organizations into development programs, potentially as implementing partners, provides a means to capitalize on refugees’ skills, reach refugees who may not be affiliated with international organizations, and take steps to close the relief-development gap in protracted refugee situations.” ~Forced Migration Review, May 2016

Throughout Africa and the Middle East, refugee-run or refugee-led nonprofits have been at the forefront of providing aid to refugees. However, in the field of refugee integration, evidence of nonprofit organizations run by a nearly-even mix of refugees and non-migrant populations has been difficult to find. In this way, the Integrationswerkstatt appears to be revolutionary in its approach.

Intercultural Integration over Multiculturalism

Chancellor Merkel declared multiculturalism to have “utterly failed” by 2010, and today this seems to be general consensus across political lines. While it is understandable why postwar Germany chose the path of “live and let live” multiculturalism for its Turkish guest workers during the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s-70s, this policy sadly led to the rise of parallel societies, creating an expensive crisis for the state, with many citizens born in Germany who cannot interact with the German social structure, including schools and doctors. Since 2010, the German government has pushed a program of integration of new migrants into German society, and this has been a major focus of Germany’s “Welcome Culture” since 2015. In 2016, following the major refugee influx, a mandatory program of linguistic and cultural integration became law for new migrants, with the aim of avoiding these mistakes this time around.

While no studies have yet been published on the value of integration over multiculturalism in Germany, there is a palpably positive feeling in western Germany that integration is working. German government (BMZ & GIZ) studies show the most positive results in other refugee-heavy countries coming from community-based integration programs like Integrationswerkstatt.

Sadly, the Welcome Culture that arose when Germany welcomed in refugees in 2015 has been declining throughout society recently. This is not just a sob story, but a security risk. Integration is one of the most powerful tools in preventing and combatting violent extremism, but for it to succeed, refugees must feel truly welcome. Civic engagement on integration is vital to public safety and stability, and civil society must be as major a player in these efforts as the state.

• Hashtags like #RefugeesWelcome and other vocal support is not enough without action

• Providing refugees with charity is not enough

• Activities aimed at making sure Germans support refugees are not enough

• Activities aimed at ensuring refugees respect German culture and laws are not enough

• Community and friendship are the goals of integration. Without intercultural community and friendships, refugees may become ghettoized, isolated, easy prey for radicalization.

• If today’s refugees are well-integrated into society, it will take a major burden from the EU when Turkey inevitably opens the border and allows up to 3 million new refugees into the EU. Today’s integrated refugees are tomorrow’s first line of integration for new refugees.

• Integration through intercultural friendship and community is the primary goal of the Integrationswerkstatt.

The Possibilities in Interfaith Dialogue

Unkel’s refugees are primarily Muslim, while volunteers are mainly Christian, with the Catholic and Protestant churches combining their efforts. There are, however, many Muslims and even Hindu, Sikh, and Jewish volunteers in the community, though no local religious spaces for these groups exist (Unkel’s synagogue was destroyed in 1938). This creates many difficulties, but also opportunities: Interfaith community and communication will be fostered through a non-denominational prayer space in the Integrationswerkstatt. In addition to other benefits of this prayer space, there is a major opportunity to improve the Muslim-Jewish relationship.

While in the USA and UK Jewish support for refugees has been strong and vocal, in Germany, Jews are the only faith community to call for a limit on refugees:

„We‘re not going to get around the need for an upper limit [on refugees]… Many of the refugees are fleeing from the terror of the Islamic State and want to live in peace and freedom, but at the same time they come from cultures in which intolerance and hatred of Jews is a stable component.“ ~Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Nov. 2015

There is no doubt that fear of antisemitism is based in reality: A study of Syrian schoolbooks by Dr. Arnon Groiss found that: “Not a single word in favor of the Jews is to be found… The Jews are denied the characteristics of a nation… detached from their ancestors… and their religion is racist… portrayed as enemies of the Arabs since antiquity, of Islam…, of all mankind, of the prophets and of God himself. The hatred of… the world… is justified. The Holocaust is justified… its magnitude is exaggerated by the Jews… one passage… calls for their elimination.”

But these refugees are not simply fleeing IS but also the very regime that institutionalized that intolerance and antisemitism into Syrian culture. To penalize those fleeing the regime for the actions of the regime is as crass as denying sanctuary to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler‘s Germany due to the risk that they might be German spies (which happened regularly).

One of Integrationswerkstatt’s first major donors is the grandson of Jewish refugees who in 1938 fled from a town only 20 kilometers from Unkel, while another early sponsor is a Rabbi from London. Individual Jews are standing with refugees, and doing so loudly fights antisemitism. Antisemitism is only fueled in Germany’s 5,500,000 Muslims when the central spokesgroup for Germany’s 100,000 Jews calls for a limit on Muslim refugees. The answer is not denying Muslims or any group refuge, but instead giving them another image of Jews, as this project does: building friendships and community, fighting antisemitism, making the world safer. It’s already happening on a small scale, with multiple Syrian refugees telling stories of “my leader told me that Jews are evil, but some of my teachers and some of my friends in Germany are Jewish, and they are good people, which means that my leader was wrong.” This is repeated wherever Jews & Jewish organizations engage in integration work. Jews are involved

in top management of this project, and broader Jewish support for it is a step toward institutionalizing that goodwill and combatting antisemitism in at-risk communities.

Why Unkel?

The city and community of Unkel is an ideal testing ground for this project. Unkel offers:

A high-risk refugee population and a medium-risk long-standing local population. The Contact Network for Refugees (Kontaktkreis Flüchtlinge), an open, ecumenical

network of over 150 volunteers in Unkel, active in refugee assistance and integration since 2015, from which the Integrationswerkstatt idea originated.

A community of relatively-well-integrated refugees who wish to give back to Unkel. A supportive city and municipal government. The support of the local Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as their charitable wings

(Caritas and Diakonie) and their regional leadership. These groups have come together to form and support the nonprofit “Gemeinsam für

Vielfalt”, for the express purpose of implementing the Integrationswerkstatt in Unkel.

Unkel’s Challenges Are Unkel’s Strength

Many of Unkel’s citizens can trace their lineage in the town back 500 years, a history that has in other places bred a small-town nativist mentality, and which played a major role in the town’s intense Nazification in the 1930s and ‘40s. Thankfully, unlike in other parts of Germany, this has not been a stumbling block for refugee integration, nor has it given rise to a new wave of right-wing populism. Instead, Unkel’s citizens have largely been convinced, by both Pope Francis and Angela Merkel’s government, that refugees will inevitably be a part of their present and future, and that “Welcome Culture” is the only way to maintain Unkel’s historical integrity.

Unkel’s location itself makes it special. Unlike newly-arriving refugees in Turkey or in Greece or Munich, the Rhein-Sieg/Eifel (RSE) region in which Unkel is situated is the endpoint for refugee journeys. There’s nowhere else to send them, they are Unkelers for the foreseeable future, giving them and their host community an increased interest in integration. According to firms who work on bringing refugees into the labor market, these are some of the harder cases to find opportunities for, as these are refugees whose work or educational experience were insufficient for the state to take an interest in them along their route toward the RSE region.

With these difficulties comes the increased possibility of disillusionment, resentment, loneliness, and radicalization if integration is unsuccessful, which segues to a major problem. As mentioned previously, Unkel has no local mosque. Many of the nearest mosques are in Bad Godesberg, a 12km bike ride from Unkel. During Bonn’s tenure as Germany’s capital, Bad Godesberg was one of its richest quarters, with most of the embassies and diplomats. After the government relocated to Berlin, diplomats left and demographics changed. Since 1995, there’s been a surge of Islamists moving to Godesberg. 2012 saw a major conflict as a Salafist rally (provoked by far-right party PRO-NRW carrying cartoons of Mohammed) erupted into violence resulting in 29 injured police officers and over 100 arrests. The German-born jihadists who have ended up joining ISIS and carrying out terror abroad come in large part from Bad Godesberg.

Though Unkel’s refugees have not joined any of Bad Godesberg’s communities, it is a serious risk to both security and integration.

Despite these major challenges on both sides, though, in the first two years of Germany’s refugee crisis, both the longstanding residents and the refugees in the community have made incredible strides in integration, with the city taking in more refugees than mandated and with the majority of those refugees making the effort to come into some form of fraternity with their new society. However, with Welcome Culture beginning to taper off, and with refugee frustrations of living in a foreign society with reduced assistance from both the state and neighbors, Unkel at this moment is fertile ground either for stellar success or for dangerous failure. Both sides need support, a support which the Integrationswerkstatt seeks to provide. Success in this region would prove definitively the program’s worth and show its possibilities for other difficult areas.

One way the Integrationswerkstatt aims to combat this potential extremism is through the aforementioned non-denominational prayer space, to prevent Unkel’s Muslim population (not only refugee) from finding community with Bad Godesberg’s Salafists, and to show the long-standing Unkelers that Islam can coexist peacefully with their Catholic faith. One of the project’s first donors, Daniel Pincus, along with a team of over two dozen donors from the Muslim Jewish Conference, is financing this project element in honor of his grandparents, Jewish refugees who fled to America from the Rhein region in 1938.

What Unkel’s Contact Network for Refugees (Kontaktkreis Flüchtlinge) does:

• Organize help in everyday lives of refugees: filling out forms, accompanying and translating at doctors and official meetings, driving refugees without valid driver’s licenses (the majority)

• Create opportunities to learn German: alphabetization, small group or individual tutoring, parent-child German courses, etc.; Additionally, volunteers work individually, helping children with their homework, assisting in the job and internship search, or simply as conversation partners to grow German skills, community, and friendship

• Build a support & assistance network, educating volunteers in best practices, organizing opportunities for those in need to meet with those with the time & interest to help

• Create contact opportunities between new and old residents: cooperation with local unions & groups, Welcome Cafes, Women‘s/Mother-Baby-Cafés, baby playgroups, knitting circles, music courses for teenagers

• Organize events and projects around themes Escape/Refuge & Intercultural Coexistence.

Main Goals:

• Help refugees and asylum seekers to quickly settle and find their way in their new home or their longer-term sanctuary

• Give refugees the skills to manage their own lives in Unkel as quickly as possible

• Initiate activities and projects that bring together the new and old residents of the community, promoting cultural exchanges that will turn refugees into residents and broaden the horizons of the German host community

• Use local publicity to give refugees a positive image in the community, and to make them feel welcome

The Kontaktkreis Flüchtlinge was incredibly large (150 volunteers) and wonderfully effective and committed for most of the first two years of Germany’s Welcome Culture. In the past months, many of the longstanding volunteers have fallen away, leaving large gaps in the necessary volunteer-power to run these activities.

The Integrationswerkstatt seeks to, in addition to its other goals, provide a central, welcoming, non-denominational hub from which to continue providing these volunteer social services, and to expand upon and in many cases professionalize them.

The Space

Gemeinsam für Vielfalt, and thereby the Integrationswerkstatt, was granted nonprofit status in October 2017 and has been guaranteed the use of Unkel’s 23,000m2 former swimming pool area, with four useable buildings and massive open spaces, for the next 30 years at a merely symbolic rental cost. The space is central to the community, easy to access, but located in a flood zone with no further permanent building permitted, leading previous potential investors away from the space. The community of Unkel is very supportive of this utilization of a space that has long been wasted.

On May 9th, 2017, the staff of Integrationswerkstatt, along with the community’s Mayor, met with local and regional utility and zoning boards to explore which of their plans are legally viable in the space, and to negotiate exactly what renovations to existing buildings are allowed. The project’s architectural consultant, a member of the city council, has suggested window renovations and roof repairs (the leaking roofs are asbestos-based) and estimates a cost of roughly 300-400,000€, an unbelievable deal for 5.7 acres for 30 years. Additionally, he explained that Unkel budgets 24,000€/year for upkeep, but that the real cost is closer to 8,000€ and with sufficient volunteers could be significantly reduced. The community has agreed to provide some consistent volunteer labor towards upkeep for the foreseeable future. Due to emergency costs such as flood clean-up and professional tree maintenance, however, those costs could never be entirely eliminated and are still being negotiated with the community.

Next Steps:

To this point, the Integrationswerkstatt has a guarantee of long-term use of a massive space for integration-oriented programs. The project already functions under partial refugee ownership and management, with co-ownership/co-management between refugees and locals fostering and deepening integration. In addition, thanks to the help of the community of Unkel and a private donation from an avid bicycle enthusiast from the United States, the bicycle-repair element of this project is attainable at a basic level with volunteer labor. This project element serves as a first job training and certification, as well as an opportunity for Germans to actually gain the experience of working with their new neighbors.

Thanks to the generous contributions of Daniel Pincus, London Rabbi Mijael Even David, and the members of the Muslim Jewish Conference, funding has already been granted for the non-denominational prayer space, yielding a sense of Abrahamic togetherness and filling the need for houses of worship.

As the budget allows, the project will grow to fit the space available. In addition to the bicycle repair program, the space is currently equipped for soccer, volleyball, table tennis, picnic areas and other small social occasions, but only in warmer, dry weather. To expand the project to a year-round endeavor with regular opening times that reliably provides a wide array of social, bureaucratic, therapeutic, sporting and otherwise integrative activities, it will be necessary to raise fund for necessary renovations such as:

• Heating

• Window replacement

• Bathroom repair

• Roof repair

• Electricity costs

The Dream

• Building a road safety practice space (asphalt or rubber practice streets, crosswalks, traffic lights, intersections, etc)

• A café and small international restaurant/bistro (halal/kosher) to serve as a meeting point and conversation-starting-point for new and old residents.

• An intercultural, multilingual bookstore or library

• 6-day-per-week openings during daylight hours

• Regular language courses (mostly German, but also English, Arabic, Kurdish, and/or Farsi, taught by residents native in those languages) at multiple levels of proficiency

• A community garden to give refugees a feeling of attachment to German soil, as well as the self-sufficiency of growing one’s own food or giving back to the project (using food grown in the community garden for cooking in the Integration Workshop’s restaurant)

• Psychological counseling for trauma victims and others with difficulty adjusting to life in Germany (in the native languages of the refugees)

• Regular professional bureaucratic consultancy and assistance (visas, bringing family over from the war zones, insurance, registering for school, kindergarten, internships, etc)

• Regular official translation of documents (drivers licenses, diplomas, etc) from country of origin (Syria, Afghanistan, etc) into German.

• Regular health (incl. dental) checkups by doctors fluent in refugees’ native languages

• Entrepreneurship trainings and business incubator possibilities, with expert guidance and consultations.

• Regular playgroups for babies & toddlers: Temporary stop-gap for those children, both German and refugee, old enough to be in Kindergarten but who have not received a space due to underpreparedness of local infrastructure for the new residents in the past 2 years.

• Sponsorships by bicycle companies

• All renovations and repairs done with green, sustainable methods and supplies

Sponsorships and Benefits to Project Sponsors

The Integrationswerkstatt is looking for further sponsors and partners to support the delivery of integration services and refugee assistance, as well as to make economically viable the repairs and upkeep of the space.

Financial assistance would allow for the necessary renovations to the space and its existing buildings to allow the project to run year-round. Additionally, financial support of the project can be done through the Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany. This connection to the church allows donations to be tax deductible.

There are two methods of financial support: unconditional and project-oriented. For those who wish to support the Integrationswerkstatt as a whole, the unconditional method is a no-strings-attached funding, first of the most vital pieces of the project and then of those pieces that are most shovel-ready and helpful thereafter. The project-oriented method allows a sponsor to pinpoint a favorite project piece (for example the self-repair workshop, the café, the library, the non-denominational prayer space, or the community garden) and fund that piece alone. For those pieces that are planned for a later stage of development, the donations are kept in a locked fund until that stage is reached. In many events, project elements will not be attainable without expensive building renovations. In the event that a specific piece that a project-oriented sponsor funds proves impossible (either for funding or zoning reasons), that donation will be returned.

However, financial contributions are not the sole method of supporting Integrationswerkstatt. Contributions of bicycle repair equipment, infrastructure repair work and supplies, digital upgrades to the space, as well as expertise and time (psychologists, trauma therapists, child care specialists, translators, doctors, nurses, dentists, language teachers, bicycle trainers, landscapers, gardeners, etc.) are welcome and needed to run the program to its fullest.

Finally, the Integrationswerkstatt, as well as the governments and civic leaders of the city of Unkel and the community of Unkel, Erpel, Bruchhausen and Rheinbreitbach, are all very interested in supporting and boosting the media promotion of any sponsors and partners who can help the project to realize its fullest potential. In addition to sponsor names being listed in announcements from the Integrationswerkstatt and, for larger sponsors, presented as well on a sign at the front of the space, press conferences, photo opportunities, events, interviews and any other media assistance that is not exploitative of the target communities will receive the full assistance of all parties involved.

To donate to Integrationswerkstatt, you can find our campaign at donorbox.org/integrationswerkstatt.

To learn more about the specifics of the project, go to our website: integrationswerkstatt-unkel.de/en/, or contact Zachary Gallant, Director of Development, at iwunkel@gmail.com or +49-(0)176-5771-1984.