WienZimmer Gartenstadt – Grätzlzentrum (Community Center) des Fonds Soziales Wien
About this good practice
The aim of the WienZimmer is active prevention work to support people with their personal issues and to make them aware of the city's various support offers before they get into precarious situations.
On the one hand, this is done through various social offerings, from tutoring and parental advice to dance and formats to combat loneliness. On the other hand, the WienZimmer Gartenstadt actively works with various cooperation partners who offer their services in the WienZimmer free of charge.
WienZimmer Gartenstadt promotes social inclusion and activation, for example by encouraging and supporting personal initiatives and low-threshold relationship building, as well as creating encounters between different groups that would usually not come together (seniors and teenagers, dancing together / Kindergarten children and people with disabilities) in shared spaces.
Main Stakeholder is the Vienna Social Fund (FSW), who ensures that people in Vienna get the support they need. The offer includes care and support services, assistance for the disabled, assistance for the homeless, debt advice and basic care for refugees.
Resources needed
WienZimmer is financed by the FSW and thus by the City of Vienna using tax money. The operational team consists of 7 people. The cooperation partners are also viewed as an extended team.In addition the project is supported by the personnel structures of the FSW and its various departments.
Evidence of success
Although the WienZimmer is still a very young project, up to 30 formats take place there every week for a wide variety of user groups from the Grätzl.The formats are well received and on average days the WienZimmer has a number of users between 70 and 150 people, spread over up to 8 different offers. Around 1/5th of the offerings in the WienZimmer consist by now of formats that the users organize themselves, supported by the WienZimmer team by providing space, materials and guidance.
Potential for learning or transfer
Grätzelarbeit is the Viennese term for neighborhood work. It is a municipal intervention strategy at district level that uses participatory forms to use all appropriate options (from standard offerings to socio-integrative or structural measures) to bring about a new sense of responsibility for living together in the Grätzel (district), in order to strengthen social cohesion in this region and thereby improve life prospects and conditions.
The social space coordinators of the WienZimmer Gartenstadt get involved in the existing structure in the Grätzel in order to improve the living conditions of residents in the immediate neighborhood and their participation in decisions that are important to them. Community work is an indispensable part of the tasks in the WienZimmer Gartenstadt in counteracting isolation and in the area of integration.
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