Volunteer

Description

Stand 129 is cultural space located at the heart of the 10th district of Vienna. It’s the second venue of the bigger Kulturhaus Brotfabrik – a cultural centre in the same district. Both Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129 are in the periphery of the cultural centres of Vienna and work to make the arts and artistic expression accessible to more people. The slogan is “Art for everybody by everybody!”. Through community arts, Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129 aim to empower people in the neighbourhood by activating individual and collective capabilities and capacities as well as strengthening local structures and networks. The work of Kulturhaus and Stand understands art and cultural activities as ways to engage with the residents and for the residents to engage with themselves and their community.

The district within witch both Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129 are located is the district with the highest population number in Vienna and a historic working-class district that also became a home to many migrants throughout the 20th century up until today. Although, Favoriten is a large district with many different areas – even rural areas with farming – the centre of Favoriten is often regarded as representative of the district. This centre of the district has a reputation as being a “dangerous” part of town and is generally regarded unfavourably by the public. When looking at the grown-up population of Favoriten (ages 25-64) 33 % have only mandatory school education, whereas this number is at 22 % in the general Viennese population. Almost a third of Favoriten’s residents (31 %) live in municipal housing complexes and, on average, a resident of Favoriten has 31m2 for themselves, whereas this number is at 35m2 in the Viennese average. An impressive 24.4 % of the population of Favoriten are non-EU country citizens (compared to 17.4 % in the general Viennese population).

In addition to the local population, people with migration histories and non-white Austrians are another distinct target group for Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129. This group is a logical extension to the first group since many local residents of Favoriten are part of this category as well.

For the work that both Kulturhaus and Stand 129 do, volunteers play an important role. Offering volunteering opportunities and engagement is a main pillar of their work. The volunteers themselves are to a large extent people from the target groups and hence face different social and political obstacles in Austria. However, Kulturhaus Brotfabrik is also accredited to house three international volunteers through the European Solidarity Corps.

The volunteers are very diverse in age, gender, the language they speak, and countries they come from. They are sometimes in their late teens and early 20s but also retired pensioners. Some of them have been in Vienna for a long time, and some have arrived merely a few months ago. In fact, refugees who are still in their asylum seeking processes are oftentimes engaged with Kulturhaus and Stand 129 in order to be more active within Austrian society. As a result, the languages that are spoken among the volunteers are manifold. German is not necessarily the common language in a lot of situations. Although the team of Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129 is multi-lingual, language can still be a barrier sometimes. In order to not be restricted by language, a focus is given on participatory practices that work with differing levels of language skills.

The diverse make-up of volunteers also sometimes leads to misunderstandings and insensitive actions amongst the volunteers themselves, which lead us to work with volunteers as the target group for the CONCRIT project. Our specific aim within the project was to design a workshop format that would engage our volunteers with issues surrounding diversity and anti-discrimination.

Title of the path

Diversity in your own words / Vielfalt in eigenen Worten

Duration

5 hours

Description

In this workshop we worked with 6 participants from different cultures and different age groups, working as volunteers for Kulturhaus Brotfabrik and Stand 129. It was a multicultural and multilingual group. Most of them live far away from their own country and culture that they know and are used to and many of them have experienced a change in their social status and identity in Austria compared to the country that they were born and raised in. Since this is generally the dominant feature of all the groups we work with, we applied the exercises we chose to make the workshop free from language barriers. As the main theme we worked on "digital story telling" and throughout the workshop we used mobile phones a lot, so we were able to address both digital literacy and storytelling at the same time.

Since we were working with a very diverse group, we first aimed to acquaint the participants with each other with the help of an introductory exercise using their mobile ringtones. Then we focused on the apps and emoji’s we use every day, focusing on the theme that an emoji can mean different things to everyone. Thus, the differences between different cultures and social groups came to the fore. In this way, we were able to address the concept of "critical thinking" in a simple way. After first warming up und creating safe place to work further with each other, we continued to with the “draw your name” exercise, which increases the creativity of the participants and make them confident in storytelling. At this point we focused on personal and collective stories, methods of storytelling, the importance of listening to stories, methods and rules for getting to know a person and really understanding them. The most important rule to remember when telling a story, listening to a story or to get know a person is that to recognize and remember that “no one is and has just one story”. Everyone has more than one identity, role, story. Reducing someone to a single situation, characteristic, story is the biggest mistake that can be made. At this point, we gave importance to developing a critical perspective on the differences between people and different identities.

The main issue we based the workshop on was to see the differences between people, the socio-cultural differences within the group as richness and to produce new stories together within this richness. This is why we chose to apply collective storytelling exercises in the second part of the workshop. Participants were invited to concentrate together on a topic and write a story using a method that was new to all of them, and to share this story with the whole group through recordings made with their mobile phones, despite the language, age and gender differences between them. The participants could have honest and critical discussions with each other about different identities and cultures, and had the opportunity to reflect and re-evaluate some personal conflict situations as well as the situations they face in society. We hope that this will also give the participants the strength to act differently in the same or similar situations next time. In addition, the participants learnt a new technique and discovered that mobile phones can be used for creative and fun work in different ways than they are used to. Working with a group, telling a story together with and in front of them, gave the participants a sense of confidence.

Program

Uhrzeit Übung Ziel Dauer Materialien

10:00 – 10:15 Handy Klingelton / Mobile Ringtone Kennenlernen und Annähern an digitale Medien 10-15 Minuten Privaten Handys der TN

10:15 – 10:25 Emojis: Welche Emojis verwendest du am meisten / was bedeutet diese Emoji in der Gruppe diskutieren): Annähern an digitale Medien, Unterschiede in den Interpretationen des gleichen Symbols finden 10 Minuten Privaten Handys der TN

10:25-11:10 Eine Kurz Geschichte mit Emojis erzählen / Draw Your Name Sie schreiben ihren Vornamen und verwandeln die Buchstaben in Emojis. Damit erzählen sie eine Geschichte 15 Minuten schreiben 30 minuten erzählen

11:10 – 11:20 Kurze Pause

11:20 – 11:35 Input: Storytelling Einführung in Storytelling 15 Minuten

11:35 – 12:20 Alltagsbeschreibung Eigenes stereotypes Denken entdecken und reflektieren 15 Minuten: Gruppenübung 30 Minuten: Diskussion Rollenkarten, Papier, Stifte 12:20 – 12:40 Input: richtiges Zuhören Reflexion über unsere Wahrnehmung der Geschichten anderer 20 Minuten Impulskarten 12:40 – 13:25 Mittagspause

45 Minuten

13:30 – 14:30 Gruppenübung: Geschichte der vielen TN probieren selber Storytelling aus; Arbeiten mit digitalen Medien, um Geschichte zu erzählen 30 Minuten: Geschichten teilen 30 Minuten: Geschichte verfilmen Private Handys der TN, Papier, Stifte

14:30 – 14:50 Sharing Entstandenen Videos mit der Gruppe teilen 20 Minuten Beamer

14:50 – 15:00 Feedback und Abschluss

10 Minuten Abhängig von Art des Feedbacks