Migration Hub Berlin – Tel Aviv

While Berlin and Tel Aviv differ in many ways, they also have things in common. One of the experiences they share is the current influx of asylum-seekers, although the two cities have very different resources and approaches for dealing with them. Berlin is on the way to becoming one of the leading start-up capitals in Europe and is able to draw on an increasingly large repository of experience in using creative methods to get entrepreneurial ideas moving. Tel Aviv also has a similar potential for dynamics and development as a city and at the same time faces even greater challenges than Berlin in terms of integrating socially disadvantaged communities and refugees into society.

Before this backdrop, Migration Hub Berlin – Tel Aviv is pursuing the goal of creating a mutually beneficial exchange via the transfer of experience between engagement on the part of civil society and project work with refugees in Germany and Israel. The teams of the organizations involved enter into an intensive collaboration and first learn about where things are right now in the communities of both cities: what is the situation for refugees and other socially disadvantaged groups in each place and what structures exist in civil society and in the start-up scene? Who is active on the ground in each of the cities and what roles do they fulfill?

In both workshops on location in Berlin und Tel Aviv and Skype conferences, the participants present each other project sketches by those active in the respective communities on social entrepreneurship and integration. Together they examine what paths have already been tried out and which additional solutions promise success. On the one hand, this journey is itself the destination in terms of exchanging ideas as well as meeting with local activists, experienced social entrepreneurs, and leading personalities in the area of migration and integration. New networks for a longer-term exchange can be created here in order to extend and connect innovative hub structures in both countries. On the other hand, it’s about revealing entirely concrete ways for how the integration of both refugees and the socially disadvantaged can succeed on the ground. The potential for entrepreneurial initiative is the crux here – or, in other words, participation via innovation.

Migration Hub Berlin – Tel Aviv is a project by Kiron Open Higher Education in Berlin in collaboration with the organization Microfy in Tel Aviv. It takes place between May 1 and September 20, 2016 and is aimed at project teams from both institutions. The goal of the project is to establish and expand social entrepreneurial hub structures in Germany and Israel. In this way, possibilities for economic and social integration for refugees and the socially disadvantaged are to be generated.