The summer school was organised by Daniela Ulber, Silke Betscher, Sabine Stoevesand and Fabian Fritz from the Department of Social Work at HAW Hamburg together with Dagmar Bergs-Winkels, a former HAW Hamburg colleague who is now a professor at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences (ASH Berlin). The first week was in Berlin, where students got an introduction to German history and the German political system. There was a walking tour of the ccity centre, a trip to the former sanatoriums in Beelitz and to the palace of Sanssouci.
The group visited a Muslim kindergarten and the Islamic Cultural Centre as well as 'Goldnetz Berlin', where they learned about the German social security system, the organisation's different fields of activity and, more specifically, three projects for the empowerment of women. However, input did not come only from the German side. CSULB students were given the opportunity to talk to students at ASH Berlin about different fields of social work and early childhood education and care in California.
After a week in Berlin, the students travelled to Hamburg, where the main focus of the second week was on social institutions and community-based work. The programme included a tour of the Sankt Georg district, where a former social worker discussed social problems and areas of development and also underlined how LGBTQ is rooted in this part of the city. The group also visited the container social project on the HAW Hamburg campus, which supports homeless women, transgender and queer people. It is run on a voluntary basis and social work students do paid internships there. At ITECH school, a vocational school in Wilhelmsburg, the group learned about school social work and the counselling of pupils, as well as the idea of competence orientation.
