Welcome Dinner Berlin is a network of volunteers that tries to connect Berliners and New-Berliners which had to fleed their home country so they get to know each other.
The principal is easy: Berliners invite New-Berliners that had to leave their home due to an imminant threat or poverty to their homes for dinner. The gesture of a shared meal in a private space enables a contact as equals and overcomes inhibitions.
Everyone who has found refuge in Berlin and wants to get to know Berliners and their culture can apply. Every Berlin home can register as a host on www.welcomedinnerberlin.de – be it family, old married couple or shared flat. The page then takes over the “Matching-Process” by criteria like language, proximity in the city or family status and initiates the first contact.
The dinner guest feels welcomed and gains insight into the life in Berlin. For the dinner host the anonymous group of New-Berliners is personalized. He get’s to know a person that the media only reported about as a “mass” or a “wave”.
The concept comes from Sweden and similar projects have started in Stuttgart and Hamburg.
Here is a video in Arabic from Deutsche Welle about the Welcome Dinner project in Hamburg.
