What would it look like if integration were truly a two-way process — one where systems also learn, adapt, and grow?

That is the central question behind Pocket Project’s newest initiative: Cultivating Cultures of Welcome , a transformative project supporting organizations, transformational leaders, and migrant communities in building the emotional, relational, and systemic capacity needed for genuine belonging to emerge.

With 25.2 million out of 83.7 million people in Germany having a migration or refugee background, the need for systemic change has never been more urgent. While many organizations across Germany are deeply committed to integration and inclusion, most efforts continue to focus on helping migrants adapt, placing the burden of change on individuals rather than on the systems that receive them.

Cultivating Cultures of Welcome challenges this approach. It envisions integration as a mutual process: one where shared spaces allow welcome to be openly offered, and where structures are designed to hold and soften difference, polarisation, and uncertainty — on both sides.

The project serves two distinct but interconnected groups: migrant-serving organizations navigating multiple systems while carrying emotional and cultural labor that often goes unseen, and organizations of welcome tasked with inclusion but stretched by resistance, overload, and complexity. Both groups learn together — without collapsing power differences — because welcoming cultures can only be co-created.

At the heart of the initiative is the Resilience Program — a practice-based training in resilience leadership and facilitation running from May through December 2026, structured across three parts: Resilience Leadership Training (May–June), Resilience Facilitation Training (July–September), and Peer Learning & Integration Practice (September–December).

A key milestone is coming up soon: an in-person interactive workshop on May 9, 2026 in Berlin (bUm, Paul-Lincke-Ufer 21), where diverse actors across sectors will gather to explore workforce integration as a mutual, systemic, and relational process. The event will also mark the official launch of the Cultures of Welcome initiative.

This project builds on over a decade of the Pocket Project’s work in collective trauma integration, social resilience, and systems change and is led by facilitators Damaris Pietsch, Sonita Mbah, and Kosha Joubert.

Interested in joining the learning journey? Begin with the Needs Assessment — participation does not commit you to the full program, but helps shape what becomes possible.

🔗 Register Here for the Berlin In-Person Gathering

🔗 Discover More about the Culture of Welcome Project Here

🧠 Glossary Connection: Sociocultural Integration