When searching for locals who are interested in becoming a mentor the opportunity arose to take part in a marketplace format organised by a local association in the district Neukölln of Berlin, Neuköllner Engagement Zentrum, whose mission is to counsel and bring together people willing to volunteer with the appropriate volunteering opportunities. This ‘Marktplatz Neukölln’ was an event where companies willing to do charity or enable their staff to do volunteering and social projects met during two hours for some kind of speed dating. At each table two organisations met and had 30 seconds each to present themselves and what kind of support they could need or offer. Then the company representatives moved to the next table and did the presentation there. After every charity had the chance to speak to every organisation the floor was open to get back to those organisations that were the most interesting for the own purpose and finally three companies were interested to let their employees take part in mingling experiences and become mentors during their working time.
Aim of the best practice:
The aim of this best practice was to explore new and more ways to find volunteers and participants for the mingling experiences as this turned out to be very difficult in Berlin, where many mentoring projects for refugees, vocational students, children from low-income families, … existed already and also other social initiatives base their work a lot on volunteering. As these organisations are all in well-established networks since many year it was hard to place mingle in the volunteering landscape of the city, so networking events as this ‘Marktplatz’ were crucial.
Objectives of the best practice:
The objective to take part in the ‘Marktplatz Neukölln’ was to find at least one or two companies willing to get engaged in mingle and that want to support their employees in taking part in the mingling experiences and in becoming a mentor for Third-Country Nationals ideally during their working time, as this would maybe attract people who usually feel they don’t have the resources to do volunteering as they don’t have enough time.
Neuköllner Engagement Zentrum
MetropolisNet: Antonia Restemeier
Zattoo + Doctorly as interested companies
Between January and March the mingling experiences took place where the corporate volunteering participants joined.
• Local networks with associations and companies.
• Time to approach, follow-up and convince the responsible person in a company
• Catching and clear dissemination material
The clear strength of this practice is to reach out to potential participants and mentors through company internal networks that we wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
An additional strength is that at least partly the barrier of time is low for participants as they can do (part of) the activities in their working time.
Also, from a coordinating perspective it is a strength that it is easier to coordinate a ‘group from the same company’ than keeping in touch with five individuals from different contexts.
The weakness of this best practice was that you should be able to ‘sell a whole package’ when cooperating with companies and have a very clear structure of when happens what and avoid waiting time between the activities.
This was not always possible as some materials were not finalised and due to coordination complications on the local level eg. That for the volunteers it was favourable to have the meeting during the day or their working time whereas TCN’s often had obligations during the day such as language courses or appointments or work and for them it would have been better to have the appointments in the afternoon or evening.
Additional, the forced break of the activities due to Civid-19 pandemic had the consequence that two of the companies stopped their engagement before the mentoring started as they had other priorities then.
It is be recommendable to approach the companies well in advance but then have a full schedule of activities that they can communicate to employees or their directors, so that everything is easily understandable, how each step works, when things will happen and how much time is needed.