Our community
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A musical ‘family in exile’
Musician and GSBTB team member Sami talks about playing music in Syria, his band and the Arabic cultural scene in Berlin.
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How do YOU give something back to Berlin?
As part of our 5-year anniversary campaign, GSBTB community members tell us how they give back to the city in their own ways.
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Malakeh and Mohammed open their own restaurant
Malakeh and Mohammed spent an exciting and heart-warming evening with friends, family and supporters to celebrate the opening of their new restaurant, "Malakeh".
What We Do
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GSBTB x Joshua Coombes: Light and Noise Art Exhibition
GSBTB partenered up with Joshua Coombes for a night dedicated to art, conversation and social causes.
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The Open Art Shelter: a year in review
A review of the Open Art Shelter's activities and sub-projects for 2018.
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GSBTB’s 5th Anniversary Party
GSBTB celebrated its 5th anniversary in a big party at Refugio, with good food, beautiful music and a wonderful community.
Society
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Welcome to Berlin – but good luck finding a place to live
Skyrocketing rents and growing homelessness in Berlin. How can you help?
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GSBTB fronts LinkedIn’s nationwide campaign
What does LinkedIn have to do with Give Something Back To Berlin, migrants and refugees? As it turns out, quite a lot.
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Crossing Borders: Showcasing Positive Stories of Migrant Integration into German Society Part II
The second part of a series in collaboration with the Post-Conflict Research Center about what we can learn from Bosnian migration to Germany in the 1990s.
Migration Matters
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Migration Matters was founded in 2016 to address the public’s biggest conundrums and fears surrounding migration and the so-called refugee crisis.
Their free video-based courses break down commonly held preconceptions about migration and offer nuanced and solution-oriented perspectives from leading thinkers in the field: researchers, practitioners, as well as migrants and refugees themselves.
We've partnered with Migration Matters to arm our community with fact-based information about migration, driven by experts.
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Integration: What Works and What Doesn’t Work?
Part six of our course Six Impossible Ideas (after Brexit): Right now, the integration of refugees and migrants is a policy priority for every European government. However, according to Dominik Hangartner of the London School of Economics, we know surprisingly little about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to integration.
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Do Migrants Take Away Jobs?
Part two of our course Six Impossible Ideas (after Brexit): Many people think that migrants take jobs away from citizens, reduce wages, or both. But you may also have heard the argument that immigrants benefit the economy. So, who’s right? Well, it's not that simple, explains Alan Manning of the London School of Economics.
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How Effective Are Borders in Keeping People out?
Part eight of our course Migration 101: Borders have partially returned to the European Union, from Brexit to Hungary’s fences. But borders and visas do not always have their intended effect, argues Hein de Haas, one of the leading scholars in the field of migration studies.
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Are Migrants City-Takers or Makers?
Part one of our course Six Impossible Ideas (after Brexit): Suzie Hall of the London School of Economics takes us to a super-diverse street in South London, telling us what we can learn about the ways migration shapes modern cities and economies.
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Are We Living in a Time of Unprecedented Migration?
Part one of our course Migration 101: More people than ever before are on the move, right? It’s not that simple, explains Hein de Haas, one of the world's leading migration researchers.
Opinion
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Tackling the refugee crisis head on: the intersection of mental health and socioeconomic position
Thayjas Patil writes about the lack of mental healthcare provision for refugees in Berlin, and how economic constraints placed on them often exacerbate the situation.
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Humans of climate change
Hertie student Stefanie Mavrakou writes a compelling piece on environmental refugees and how terminology hinders their recognition in the international refugee regime.
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Befriending Loneliness in Berlin
"I’ve decided to interpret my loneliness as a friend, reminding us of our place lest we get too carried away within our tiny constructed worlds."
Mental Health with Eed Be Eed
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GSBTB partnered with Arabic-German newspaper Eed Be Eed for a special edition of the newspaper focused on mental health. Here we present a selection of the articles, many of them available in English, German and Arabic.
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“I love my son differently”
Diana al-Atwani writes about her relationship with her mother, and the lessons she has carried forward when fostering bonds with her own son.
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Birds, prayers and how to play the strings of the soul: thoughts about the Islamic reflections on music therapy
Though modern psychiatry lauds 'new discoveries' such as music therapy, music has been used as a therapeutic tool for centuries in Islamic societies - find out how in this article.
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Overcoming survivor’s guilt
A step-by-step guide to overcoming the survivor's guilt that manifests itself within you.
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What connects us all: survivor’s guilt as a universal human experience
Hania Hakiel and Antonia Stasiuk draw comparisons between the experiences of survivor's guilt in Holocaust survivors with those of Syrian refugees in Berlin, to show how such guilt is a fundamentally human experience.
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I’ve survived the war, but why can’t I make sense of my feelings anymore?
Hania Hakiel retells experiences of people in Berlin who suffer from survivor's guilt, showing the different ways in which this guilt can manifest in the body and the mind as well as steps one can take to address it.