Welcome Dinner Cologne is a civil society initiative that connects guests from all over the world with hosts from Cologne. This works so well, we currently can’t keep up with matching refugees and immigrants on the one side and hosts on the other side. If you want to help and engage as a “Matchmaker”, please send us an email: mail@welcome-dinner.koeln
Welcome Dinner is a simple idea: Hosts from Cologne register on the website and tell us which languages they speak and how many guests they want to invite. The process for the guests works quite similar. They can register on our website and tell us whether they will bring along friends or kids.
Then the Welcome Dinner team – currently a group of about 15 volunteers from Cologne – will start the process of matching the guest with the host. During this matching process we will make sure that the guest and the host are not living too far from each other, that the number of guests does not exceed the capacities of the host and that they have at least one language in common. After the matching, we will phone the guest and host to explain the details. Afterwards, the host will contact the guest and arrange a date for the dinner.
So far we initiated more than 100 Welcome Dinners. We hope that these encounters contributed to create an atmosphere of welcome in our city and enabled new friendships and support networks. Welcome Dinner works quite well. We believe that it works well because it is a very simple idea and because the gesture that someone opens his or her door and invites someone to share a meal cannot be misunderstood; whatever language barriers there might be.
But now we need your support. We look for volunteers who – for a couple of months or longer – help hosts and guests getting together. In practice this means to make phone calls with both sides, to provide guests and hosts with all relevant information and, after the dinner, ask for a photo and a short story about the encounter. At the beginning, you will work together with an experienced team member from Welcome Dinner. Also, you can work in a flexible and self-determined manner. You decide how much time you want to invest and you can do most things from your home. But the best thing is: It will make you feel great when, after the dinner took place, a host will tell you about an encounter with others that he or she would never had without your help … We are looking forward to your email!
Do you want to join? Send us an email: mail@welcome-dinner.koeln
More information: http://welcome-dinner.koeln/en