FAMILY WORK: Berlin Mothers Lead Effort to Integrate Germany’s Turks

BERLIN Red scarves, bright smiles, focused training -- those are the trademarks of Berlin's "Neighborhood Mothers" campaign, an effort to mobilize women to break the walls of isolation surrounding immigrant communities.

Turks have flowed into Germany for 50 years as temporary guest workers -- and rarely returned home. At 2.8 million, they're the country's largest immigrant group. But they're also the least well-integrated -- Germany's poorest educated, worst paid, and most jobless population group.

The fault is partly Germany's own -- not just isolated xenophobic attacks on immigrants (which the government condemns), but slowness in granting Turks basic citizenship rights. Until the late '90s, German political leaders didn't recognize the need for active social programs to help Turks integrate.

But integration is also hampered by fundamentalist Islamic practices of male domination that some Turkish immigrants embrace, leading to forced marriages, domestic violence, and subjugated lives for women. There have been rare but ominous "honor killings" by male relatives of Muslim women seeking to lead independent lives.

The wonder of Berlin's "Neighborhood Mothers" campaign is that it recruits Turkish women themselves to help their sisters (and their families) forge a path to social engagement, new skills, timely health care, and greater chances for success in German society.

Regular social services have difficulty reaching Turkish families, notes Hella Dunger-Loeper, Berlin's secretary for building and housing. "We can't get close -- a young female social worker with a short skirt generates a reaction -- 'I don't want my daughters to dress like that.'"

So Dunger-Loeper and her colleagues invented Neighborhood Mothers, mostly to reach Turkish but also Arabian (North African) families. Their first class of 28 Turkish mothers and grandmothers was recruited and trained in 2004, with successive waves since.

"For the mothers it's normally their first job, yielding small incomes but building self-confidence," says Dunger-Loeper. Over a six-month course the women are instructed about daycare centers, kindergartens, schools, and the immense lifetime advantages of full educations. They learn about the payoffs of learning German, about non-violent rearing of children, how to access the medical system for themselves and their children, finding employment, and more.

Then they're sent out to recruit -- door to door -- wearing their red scarves and carrying handbags with an attractive family logo. They find families in parks, at schools, or at markets. They visit the families they attract at least 10 times, for up to two hours each time, building a base of confidence. "In the end," claims Dunger-Loeper, "the entire family, the father included, is part of these talks."

Self-confidence and social contacts are promoted through activities ranging from girls' clubs to weekly meal events at which immigrant women cook for several dozen people and Berlin's governing mayor or other officials drop by and discuss issues with residents.

Did Berlin's city council automatically approve funding for these activities? No way, Dunger-Loeper replies: "It was awful at first, with suggestions the monies were going for nothing." She acknowledges it's hard to prove results statistically. But she says officials' attitudes have become far more positive. Positive evaluations from the German national government, the European Union, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have helped.

Then, last year, the Metropolis organization of world mayors, meeting in Sydney, gave Neighborhood Mothers its top award for improving the lives of city dwellers. Of particular appeal to the judges: the project's "win-win" approach, aiding both immigrants and the city at large.

But while the Berlin program's operating formula is unique, it fits well into the neighborhood outreach effort the German federal government, in collaboration with states and cities, has pushed in this decade. The focus is on broad sets of social problems -- not just immigrants' living conditions but social polarization caused by loss of traditional manufacturing jobs, low skills of many workers, and growing income gaps.

With national government support, about 500 local areas now have systems of "neighborhood management" in which authorities work with multiple agencies and local residents to pinpoint local problems and shape solutions.

The contrast to Germany's historic authoritarian and "government knows best" approaches could hardly be more dramatic.

But it's the story of conscious, sensitive outreach to immigrant groups, symbolized by Neighborhood Mothers, which bears the most direct significance for other European nations and the United States.

Many immigrant communities bring new energy and inventiveness to their newly adopted countries. Yet the immigrant ranks clearly include millions of undereducated and poorly assimilated migrants. The peril, both to social cohesion and to local and national economies in this information age, is real.

As the Berlin program suggests, the best approach may not be sweeping government decrees but rather offering a personal touch for immigrants, opening doors for them in the neighborhoods and cities where they've begun their new lives. © The Washington Post Writers Group