• Building Home in Berlin: The Inside-Out Approach with Katarina Stoltz

    Building Home in Berlin: The Inside-Out Approach with Katarina Stoltz

    Katarina Stoltz, originally from Sweden, spent her first months in Berlin crying over Prosecco on a friend’s balcony in Prenzlauer Berg. She’d left behind a thriving career as a Reuters photojournalist in Warsaw. Her work was published in the New York Times, capturing Poland’s entry into the European Union. She’d quit her job, sold her newly renovated apartment, and moved to…

  • Rising Ukrainian Engagement Powers Berlin’s Civic Scene

    Rising Ukrainian Engagement Powers Berlin’s Civic Scene

    WHP: Can you briefly introduce your initiative? What is its main mission in Berlin? Tetyana Lavuta: Svoji.de is an online platform that increases the visibility of Ukrainian civic initiatives in Berlin and Brandenburg and supports their networking with other migrant communities. The name evokes a sense of belonging and safety: the Ukrainian word “svoji” (written in Latin script) refers to people,…

  • Newcomers Are Not a Problem to Solve: How SINGA Deutschland Builds Participation

    Newcomers Are Not a Problem to Solve: How SINGA Deutschland Builds Participation

    WHP: Could you briefly introduce SINGA Deutschland? What is its main mission in Berlin? Sen Zhan: SINGA Deutschland was founded in 2016 by a brilliant team of three co-founders — Luisa Seiler, Sima Gatea, and Vinzenz Himmighofen — as a humanitarian response at a moment when many newcomers were arriving in Germany. From the beginning, the work was not only about…

  • The Berlin Lesson: Trust People, Not Bureaucracies

    The Berlin Lesson: Trust People, Not Bureaucracies

    I was reading Walter’s article about volunteering, and made me think deeply. I come from a society where volunteering was never a tradition. The imperative was: everyone takes care of themselves. If someone works unpaid, they are considered a loser or being taken advantage of. Applying to university never required any kind of volunteer experience, so it was never part of…

  • The Power of Ehrenamt: Finding Connection Through Volunteering in Berlin

    The Power of Ehrenamt: Finding Connection Through Volunteering in Berlin

    The news is grim these days. Everywhere we look things are going off the rails. The cost of living, and the political maneuverings… everything seems like too much, too soon, and too fast. And it’s easy to give in to the atomization of 21st century life; we are millions of people living alone. Alone in a crowd.  Last week I wrote…

  • Six Pictures from the Future — A Glimpse into Tomorrow’s Berlin

    Six Pictures from the Future — A Glimpse into Tomorrow’s Berlin

    For a campaign, you need many elements — but everything starts with funding. That’s why we first want to give enormous thanks to the supporters of WahlheYmatPost, to everyone who believes in what we do and why we do it: the Welcome Alliance Fund by ProjectTogether and the Bundesministerium des Inneren. And a heartfelt thank-you to our cooperation partner, Berliner Morgenpost.…

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