Meet Your Neighbors - Dialogue strengthens social Solidarity

Meet Your Neighbors is a project that initiates and promotes conversations between people with and without a history of migration across Germany.

The aims of the project are:

• to strengthen people with a history of migration and flight and increase their participation in society,
• to enable dialogue and exchange on an equal footing,
• to promote democratic coexistence and social solidarity, and
• to connect people, actors and organisations with each other.

Together with associations, initiatives and migrant self-organizations, Meet Your Neighbors designs and organizes events that promote dialogue and encounters between people with and without a history of migration and flight.

The event concept is deliberately kept open, so that it can be adapted to the ideas of the actors and the local conditions. From biographical workshops to multilingual storytelling salons or future workshops – we are open to different formats of encounter!

Meet Your Neighbors finances the majority of the costs incurred. We support the conception, press work and realization of the event. We activate our network and take care of the journalistic and photographic and documentary support.

The events take place primarily in rural areas:

2021 is the project in Brandenburg,

2022 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and

2023 in the Ruhr region.

What Meet Your Neighbours changes

At Meet Your Neighbors, people with shared and different experiences meet in a safe space. This can create networking and relationship opportunities that can have a positive effect on local social cohesion.

A major objective of Meet Your Neighbours is to derive and formulate political demands from the stories and experiences of people with migration and refugee histories. Local politics is therefore actively involved in the project in order to facilitate existing access to structures, networks and work.

Where do the Meet Your Neighbors events take place?

The events can take place anywhere people can come together and feel comfortable. Whether a location is suitable also depends on the event format and the number of participants.

In previous project cycles, the events often took place in bookstores, libraries, and other cultural venues, which you can find an overview of here.

What Meet Your Neighbours has achieved so far

Since 2016 Meet Your Neighbours has organised over 60 events throughout Germany. Amongst others we have been in Berlin, Bonn, Bremen, Bruchsal, Dresden, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Jena, Cologne, Mainz, Munich, Nienburg/Weser, Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, Bergen on Rügen and Greifswald. In addition, a Meet Your Neighbours festival was held in Munich’s Monacensia at the beginning of 2018. All events have shown how enriching diversity is. We are holding on to that!

Participate

We welcome anyone who wants to get involved in Meet Your Neighbors. We support, advise and accompany in all phases of planning: from the idea to the conception to the implementation and follow-up. If you would like to become active and organize an event yourself, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Here you can find all publications, downloads and contributions that have been created within the framework of our Meet Your Neighbors project:

2021

Panel Discussion: Forms and Experiences of Civil Society Conversation and Encounter Formats

As part of the final digital conference of the project Democracy? A Question of the Constitution! project, WIR MACHEN DAS held a panel discussion in which the approach and experiences of Meet Your Neighbors were also presented and discussed.

2020

Documentation of all events in 2020 and the years before.
In editorially supervised texts by selected authors who have respectively accompanied the events.

2019

A Year with Meet Your Neighbors (2019) (PDF).

A Year with Meet Your Neighbors is a report from the previous project cycle on the events that took place, illustrated with beautiful photographs. A hard copy can be ordered from our press office.

2018

Wir sind hier. Geschichten über das Ankommen  (external link).
The anthology „Wir sind hier. Geschichten über das Ankommen “ has been published by Allitera Verlag.

 

Meet Your Neighbours is a project from WIR MACHEN DAS / wearedoingit e.V. funded by the Stiftung Mercator.

We would like to thank our cooperation partners from the previous project phases: Fonds Soziokultur, Allianz Kulturstiftung and Stiftung :do.