ALBuM – Living intercultural strengths together!
Advisory and training measures in the Hannover business area
Christina Bötel, Hannover City council
Situation in Hannover, Germany – capital of lower saxony
For over 50 years now Hannover has presented itself as a cosmopolitan trade fair city – and our day-to-day lives are also intercultural experiences: we’ve a population of about half a million, and something like a quarter of them have an immigration background – that’s about 120,000 people from over 100 different cultures. This diversity enriches the city’s life, and offers resources that will be crucial for the city’s future. These people are here to stay – not only in the picture of our city life but in its businesses and workplaces, and the enterprises that they have set up are a powerful economic factor and job motor.
But the figures also show that we’ve a long way to go on equality of access to education and the job market. The same applies to representation in politics, public administration and other areas. As a city administration we ask ourselves time and again: what can we do to encourage integration and coexistence in our community? Along with supporting single initiatives and measures we see it as our responsibility to set priorities and to help other local players take the wider view. As of this year we’ve taken a new direction: the Mayor is putting a lot of energy into devising a local integration plan, and has set up an internal steering group and six workgroups who have been tackling the issues. The six workgroups focus on:
1. Language, education and vocational training
2. Integration at work and in the economy
3. Social integration
4. Coexistence in the city
5. Intercultural personnel and organisational development of the city administration
6. Anti-racism and anti-discrimination, and the situation of illegal immigrants
The Mayor places a great deal of importance on a participatory procedure. Up to now, people from immigrant backgrounds have been very poorly represented in the political arena. The whole point is to stimulate dialogue between the cultures in Hannover and to increase opportunities for people from immigrant backgrounds to get involved in shaping their city’s future.
Development Partnership ALBuM – Living intercultural strengths together!
Regarding the last aspect, our own EQUAL Project, ALBuM, already struck out in a new direction two years ago. ALBuM is a development partnership of eight diverse institutions and a group of ten different sub-projects. This development partnership stands for a network in which the partners live their shared intercultural strengths, so educational facilities and immigrant organisations have worked with the city administration’s education and qualification department to launch a job market campaign for people from immigrant backgrounds which has taken off well. ALBuM is an offer of advice and qualification
(1) for businesses
§ run by immigrants who wish to secure and improve their competitiveness, or
§ which employ significant numbers of immigrants.
(2) for immigrants
§ who are in work and wish to further their careers, or
§ who could be activated to enter the employment market in areas with good prospect
(3) for people an institutions wishing to, can integrate interculturality into their normal working lives
In the following presentation I’ll focus on our network within the development partnership. This is not meant to detract from the work of the practical front-end services; rather, we see the network as the essential basis for their successful and innovative work.
Development Partnership as essential basis
Under the motto, “Living intercultural strengths together!” we’ve steadily established a market presence in Hannover that stands for:
§ potential-oriented services – the clients’ professional competences and experience are the basis for developing their professional prospects in the measures.
§ sharing rights and responsibilities equally in tandem projects between immigrant organisations and educational facilities – they devise and provide the services together.
§ intercultural teams and intercultural learning – something that we take very seriously in the development partnership and in the seminars, and see as an additional enrichment of the work.
§ continual improvement and supplementary activities to sensitise people to the underlying issues.
Hannover City Council has assumed responsibility for local and transnational coordination, and it is precisely at this interface that competence and neutrality are required. The various organisations are, when all’s said and done, also ‘competitors’ on the education market. An important precondition for committed and reliable cooperation is therefore, along with our shared aim, establishing equality of rights and responsibilities for the work together. Without a coordinating agency that is generally accepted and ‘unpartisan’ this is difficult to imagine.
The partners see themselves as essential components of ALBuM who bring their competences to the network but, of course, also benefit from the cooperation in their own work. Hannover City Council is also the intermediary at the political level and in the strategic discussions.
The particular strength of ALBuM for the region is precisely this network, which represents qualitative progress on job market and employment policies. For one thing this is a result of the way in which the target groups are reached and, through the measures, their prospects of professional integration are developed. For another, the participating institutions themselves develop through the intercultural dialogue process. And thirdly, the network increasingly acquires weight and importance as a player in the city political debate.
Results
§ Nearly 1.000 are involved in qualification and skilling programmes to enhance their employment prospects.
§ Workshops and seminars for employees of immigrant-run enterprises are being held all the time. ALBuM is now working with more than 50 immigrant enterprises across the region.
§ Other services are targeted at disseminators for whom interculturalism is part of their everyday professional life – people here in the city administration, in the employment services, in citizens’ advice facilities, in schools and also in businesses.