Newspaper & Web, one of the eight SEMPRE Accelerators social start-ups, combines journalism with social innovation and aims at supporting the integration of migrants and refugees with low to medium German language skills. In cooperation with a local magazine, the migrants in the start-up publish articles about their lives, their backgrounds and their current situation, their hopes and their future plans.
On 3 March 2020, the participants of the Newspaper & Web group, the SEMPRE team of our project partner WAK and stakeholders from the region met for their breakfast event. The management of the Diaconie of Husum, Mrs Adelheit Marcinczyk invited the participants to the Diaconie’s premises for coffee and cake. In a relaxed atmosphere, a lively exchange of ideas took place between all participants. Through the very intensive talks and discussions on various topics, different but also very constructive points of view came up, which led to solutions by themselves.
A core principle of SEMPRE Accelerators is that social service providers and users, in this case migrant journalists, co-create their social start-ups. They jointly set up stable and efficient management and leadership structures for their social start-up and make it fit for the future. To bridge the gap between social service providers and members of the social start-ups, SEMPRE Accelerators employs several tools. One of them is the “social start-up breakfast”: in a breakfast atmosphere, the start-ups get the chance to present their achievements to a broader audience of social service provider staff. At the same time, the event is a possibility to establish informal contacts and explore networking which may turn out helpful in later stages of the start-up development.
The project participants felt very comfortable in this round and were happy about the possibility to talk about different topics in an open and relaxed atmosphere. According to the participants, a meeting in such an informal setting contributes to confidence-building and stable networking among all participants and should be repeated at irregular intervals.
We, the WAK team, would like to thank the Diaconie of Husum for their hospitality and look forward to continuing this sort of events in the future.
