2023 marked officially the 10th anniversary of Give Something Back to Berlin. Starting as a movement in 2012, GSBTB registered as an association as a collective of migrants, refugees, and locals a year later. Migration has provided the general framework, although our thematic field varied from education to culture and arts, from preventing extremism to social cohesion and belonging.

Doing ten years of community building with thousands of volunteers and serving tens of thousands of people required an analysis of our whereabouts, what we did well and where we could improve. We started a collaborative assessment process in 2022 with the help of a diverse group of professionals from different business sectors, nonprofits and public institutions. It took more than seven months for the group to go through various steps of our work and structure and offer their recommendations moving forward. The GSBTB team acted swiftly on those recommendations and started restructuring its management, finances, and administration of projects. The process is yet to be completed, and we will have a progress check in Spring 2024. Nevertheless, here is a short list of what we have learned this year:

Resilience for change management

It was only a short time before organisational resilience was understood as an intercultural competence to enable people from diverse backgrounds and cultures to work seamlessly together. As a migrant-led organisation, we have been far beyond that. For us, resilience is about responding to ruptures and shocks in society while keeping our nest safe and the interactions in the team and the community meaningful. That means checking in with each other as a team, supporting the community, and supervising our volunteers. We did much of this by participating in workshops on psychological safety and mental health, adopting some of the practices we have learned, and systematising those we have already been working with. Working on our organisational practices helped us stay agile for the organisational changes we have gone through.

Navigating financial ambiguity

As expected, the pandemic and wars also hit the economy. With drastic cuts on public expenditures in the social field in Germany and donors pulling out from Europe, funding for civil society projects is in decline. Fundraising has become more competitive, while financial forecasting is becoming more challenging. We had to revise our budget more often than ever, revisit our priorities, and squeeze what we already had to ensure we could have some savings left for next year. At the same time, we diversified our income sources, introducing new concepts of income generation and kicking off new collaborations to sustain our service to the community. Further measures included hiring a new fundraising manager and founding a small fundraising team that established a diversified income pipeline.

Including multiple stakeholders in the discussion

Community building is a collaborative task. GSBTB couldn’t have built a community had there not been the multiperspectivity of different stakeholders. We have understood this since our early days, but we put this into practice in almost every step this year. We worked with various experts who provided their insights into organisational development matters, we reached out to other organisations for their expertise to improve some of our internal processes, we exchanged ideas with people from public institutions for alignment, we joined forces with organisations out of our sector to develop new concepts, and most importantly, we involved people from our community in these to understand the needs and wishes of our community. 2023 has been a genuinely collaborative year for us, and we greatly enjoyed this!

Compassion and authenticity

This year, we kept reminding each other that we have to be compassionate and authentic to ourselves in the first place. Our staff went through several challenges this year, individually and as a team. We felt distressed by news coming from far away, and we felt the urge to respond to things happening at our door. We also recognised that we could not be 100% present at work while dealing with other things intensively. And yet we told ourselves and each other that we could be authentic and it is okay to be imperfect. We are so happy to see compassion taking our team collaboration to a new level.

Room for expression and communication

Being a migrant-led organisation means having roots all over the world. Our community is a mix of migrants, refugees, and locals, and we need to make room for all voices to be heard and understood. We took some extra steps towards that in 2023. We ran small surveys to establish a basis for a system to take the pulse of our community, and we reached out to groups we hadn’t been in touch with before and provided them with a platform to express themselves; we recruited new members to our Board of Directors and Members Committee, we valued and reorganised our active listening sessions where our team can share their feelings and emotions beyond their work confidentially in a safer space.

Some of these learnings came naturally from a process we stepped in. Some of them required conscious practice. We learned much about how to be a team for GSBTB’s next decade. We appreciated each other. And yet, one of our biggest takeaways was the outcome of our discussion on why we do this.

Our purpose is to create inclusive, safer spaces to connect, come together, and fulfil the basic human need for belonging. We strive to empower individuals, uphold dignity, and forge resilient communities by fostering networks and promoting social cohesion.

Happy New Year!