How Diversity Can Strengthen Rural Communities

“Rural areas offer unique opportunities for integrating newcomers, but they also face very specific challenges,” said Sandra Breka, Managing Director of the Robert Bosch Stiftung. “A great deal is being done at the local level, but some issues can only be addressed through policy changes at state and federal level.”

The Robert Bosch Stiftung addresses precisely these questions, while developing promising approaches to the diverse challenges involved, through its funding programme “Land.Zuhause.Zukunft – Integration and Participation of Newcomers in Rural Areas.” In 2017, the Foundation conducted almost 100 interviews with a range of stakeholders in seven rural districts. Different approaches are now being piloted in six districts until June 2019.

For example, Coburg District focuses on refugees and migrants as potential recruits for the (elderly) care sector. It quickly became clear that many smaller care providers struggle to offer newcomers the support they need when settling in. “As a rule, recruitment ends once someone has been recruited,” the participants concluded in their interim assessment. Yet integration involves more than simply entering the labour market.

“For us, intercultural integration also means that, in a 60-bed care facility, we might employ someone from Kosovo, the Philippines, Syria and Vietnam. The question then is how we can successfully embrace cultural diversity in everyday practice, including among the people receiving care,” says Martina Berger from the Coburg District Administration.
One idea is to bring together care professionals from across the district while also preparing the local population for immigration and the changes it brings.

In the Harz district, the funding programme focuses on integrating integration services and data management. The preliminary conclusion is stark: local authorities lack the data management systems needed to support integration effectively. “We need a Data Exchange Improvement Process 3.0,” one participant urged.

Some initial guidance is already available. A recently published brief by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, “Linking Data, Tracking and Supporting Individual Integration Pathways,” (German only) outlines how municipalities can begin developing individualised integration monitoring systems and what support they need to do so.

The conference concluded with a discussion on the question: “How do we want to shape the way we live together?”
“There is no one-size-fits-all solution,” said Dr. Markus Kerber, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community. “We need patience, because this is a long-term process, and tolerance for the many setbacks we will have to overcome.”

Professor Petra Bendel of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg proposed a Europe-wide matching system: “Municipalities could voluntarily develop an integration profile in advance and match it with the needs, knowledge and skills of refugees at the hotspots in Greece and Italy. This would also make it much easier to take into account what individuals want, what they can contribute and where they would like to live.”
Such an approach, she argued, would also strengthen municipalities’ capacity for innovation, help establish sustainable structures and promote greater participation.

Thomas Brych, District Administrator of Goslar, also sees an advantage in the population decline affecting rural areas. “We had so much vacant housing that we did not have to set up a single large-scale accommodation centre and were able to deliberately house refugees across the district in smaller, decentralised accommodation.” Nevertheless, he says that his district has “not yet achieved the breakthrough when it comes to building relationships with local residents.” Much depends on people’s different levels of language proficiency. 

His assessment is therefore hardly surprising: “Integration takes five years. I would double that, and I believe it will only truly succeed with the next generation.”

“We need to ensure that the place refugees were once assigned as their new home becomes a place they actively choose to call home,” Annette Widmann-Mauz emphasised. Whether this takes five or ten years depends on many factors.
One thing is already clear, the Minister of State said: people who feel at home in rural areas and see opportunities and a future for themselves there are more likely to stay and play an active role in shaping their communities.

In this sense, “Land.Zuhause.Zukunft” is not a slogan just for refugees or immigrants, but for everyone living in rural areas. And it is also a call to action for policymakers.