So, now it's about time to get back to a more serious matter: my work as a volunteer in Aarhus Kommune.
For the first few months, I worked on the Folkets Møde organization – you can read all about it here. But after this event, Maria and I – still my partner in crime – started working on the biggest part of our project, a study regarding social integration of internationals in Aarhus.
Quite an accurate project for two international volunteers in Aarhus!
Something I very much appreciate about working in Denmark, is the autonomy everyone gives you in your work. Coming from France and its very hierarchical organization, with a lot of formalities to respect, it was at first very confusing. But after a few months working here, I can say it is definitely making the all job much more interesting because the project you are working on really becomes your project.
From our report, the municipality hopes to get an outsider perspective on how they are welcoming internationals and what they can do to get to the next level of integrating internationals. Since we are integrated into the volunteering and co-creation secretariat, our report obviously has to be related to the participation in communities. But this was pretty much our only “rule”.
Our first step was obviously doing research, a lot of research, regarding social integration, sense of belonging and many other concepts we needed to understand to start working on this subject. We also took some time to understand the context we were in and all the initiatives available in Aarhus.
This leads us to our second step, meeting many organizations participating in the social integration of internationals in the city and organizing focus groups – conversation with several participants to discuss their experience- with internationals living in Aarhus. This step was probably the most interesting so far, since we got to meet a lot of different people and gather different perspectives and inputs from all these people. The focus groups, especially were very interesting since we were able to confront our experience with other people’s ones. That’s the moment we were able to confirm we were not putting much effort in integrating with the Danes. Here comes exclusive information about our findings: In order to integrate with Danes – not just internationals – it’s better to learn Danish (I gave up after 2 weeks) and join a community, like a club or a volunteering organization (6 months here, we both just signed up at the gym).
Anyway, we are now ready to launch phase 3: establishing some recommendations. To do so, we will rely on our findings so far and identify some good initiatives happening all around Europe that could be established in Aarhus. Then will come another interesting phase, presenting the results of our work during a public event, that we are already starting to organize, which will gather many professionals working on social integration of internationals.
That’s definitely going to be an interesting moment!