50th international destination!

Just before our 10th anniversary, planpolitik is happy to announce its 50th international destination: Tallinn, where our colleague Annegret Schneider participated in a project meeting of ImTeaM4EU. As this meeting was right on her birthday, the whole team wishes once more a “happy birthday”!

Looking at the all-time international destinations’ ranking, Shanghai is leading with 12 visits, followed by Paris with 11, Torino with 8 and Brussels as well as Zurich with 6 visits each. If you take our office in Neukölln as a reference, Shanghai, Addis Ababa, Sintra in Portugal and St. Petersburg are the furthest places we have been towards the East, South, West, and North. Thinking of the number of destinations within one country, Poland is the country with the highest number of different destinations (6), followed by Vietnam with four different destinations. Until today we dream of one day working on the other side of the Atlantic. So, dear readers in Vancouver, New York City, Guatemala City or Rio: Please invite us, we will be happy to come – no matter whether it is for a simulation game, a future workshop or a negotiation training.

planpolitik with PEP!

Success story in August: We are a partner in the Jean-Monnet-Project “Simulation games for action-oriented teaching about the EU in primary education (PEP)”! Under the direction of Prof. Monika Oberle, Head of the Department of Political Science of Georg-August-University Göttingen, we will organise 14 simulation games with more than 350 forth-grade pupils and additionally two trainings for teachers. Subsequently, Prof. Oberle will evaluate the simulation games with her team.

In case you are interested in participation, please feel free to get in touch with us: a.schneider@planpolitik.de

A conference will be organised at the end of the project to present the study’s results. These as well as the simulation games used in the project will then be available free of charge. You can find more information on the project on its website pep.uni-goettingen.de (German version).

Ideaslab – on our on behalf

It has become a nice and important tradition to use the calm weeks during the summer vacations to organise a planpolitik retreat. There we reflect on the past months, develop ideas and plans for the months to come and discuss our strategic direction. This time we went to the quiet bungalow park Klingemühle in Brandenburg’s Schlaubetal. 485 facilitation cards and the same number of mosquito bites later, we had developed a number of new project ideas as well as game concepts, had defined our essential orientation and had come up with exciting new concepts for our online simulation platform. Next to all the intense work we enjoyed the beautiful lakes around Klingemühle for some cooling swims.

planpolitik goes Bundestag!

A nice premiere: This September we will run a workshop on behalf of the German Bundestag! In the four-week long “IPS programme for the Arab countries” we are in charge of the session on national, ethnic and religious minorities in Germany. For three days the 24 participants from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Oman will learn how various minority groups organise themselves in Germany and of how they deal with state authorities. Among others, they will meet the head of the secretariat of minorities and visit both the Centrum Judaicum and the Sehitlik Mosque in Neukölln. Moreover, they will meet members of the initiative „Asyl in der Kirche Berlin e.V.“