Workshop Flyer in English, German and French
Where: we are looking for a place for the workshop – we will let you know where exactly it will be when you register.
We invite you to a workshop to talk about the experiences you have had with living together, as people offering places to stay and as refugees. How was your contact with the people you talked to in the sleeping place/ flat organizing groups? What kind of experiences did you have with living together and what can we learn?
People who are thinking of offering a sleeping place or flat, who are interested in how this works, and other
accommodation (and other) support groups are also very welcome to share their experiences with us.
What can we all learn, what needs to change, and what works well?
In this workshop we would like to
– Think about and improve cooperation between the groups involved in organizing places to sleep/flats, the people who are looking for a place and the people who offer a place
– Give everyone involved a chance to exchange their ideas and experiences
– Develop criteria to improve how we organize the way we connect people to find a place to sleep/flat and to improve communication between everyone involved. These will be based on the feedback in the workshop [what works well / what would be helpful but is not essential / what are the “no gos”].
– Give people who are thinking of offering a sleeping place or flat an opportunity to receive more information and backup.
We have been doing this kind of organization of sleeping places for around a year now. Mostly we manage to find sleeping places that are offered for a very short time, sometimes a place is offered for a few weeks and only a handful have ended up becoming an opportunity to live somewhere for the long term. Sometimes offers for short periods are
also important for people who have no opportunity to find housing in the mainstream market for flats or to find a place “without papers”. Many people live on the streets, in remote Lager (isolated from social contacts), are threatened with deportation and are looking for a safe place.
We know that short or medium-term offers are ONLY stopgaps and that the offers are always on shaky ground. From our privileged situation we share living space; however, in the long- term we can only engage on an equal footing with the people who are looking for a place to stay if their situation gets more stable. Until the demands to abolish the Residenzpflicht, and to guarantee a right to live and work here are met, organizing sleeping places can only be an emergency solution, an act of solidarity that does not overcome the differences in life situations and the dependency that people who come here are forced into. But it is an attempt to break isolation, to give support and to respond on a human level.
In this workshop we want to find out how everyone involved (organizing groups, people looking for and people offering sleeping places/flats) can cooperate together to make the process racism-critical, low-conflict and empowering.
The workshop will be in English / German. Translation from/into French too, if needed.
Please let us know you are coming by 15th July. We will send you confirmation with the ADDRESS and an overview of the timing for the various parts of the workshop. Do you still have any questions? Do you need translation into another language?
schlafplatzorga@gmail.com – 0176 37325499 We look forward to interesting, curious and
critical participants!
The Oplatz Group for Organising Sleeping Places