The first input conducted by professor Thomas Groll, CGYPP Alumnus of the program year 2010/11, dealt with a very global topic ”How to prepare sportsmen/sportswomen into a new cultural environment?”. How are the “expat-sportspeople” trained to gain crucial intercultural abilities for better adaptation in their new place? The debate brought many interesting aspects on the agenda, e.g. could any successful good practices from sport management be used in other fields with similar challenges, i.e. integration of immigrants? These issues were thematically further developed in the debate with Kristin Frauenhoffer. She works at proSalamander project that supports educated immigrants to be recognized as highly qualified people preventing them from doing unqualified jobs. Her personal insights gained during the project implementation revealed strong biases of Germans against foreigners both in state administration, in tertiary education, as well as in private sector.

The second thematic block focused on specific problems of diversity in German-Czech context. The debate with director of Tandem Regensburg, Thomas Rudner, highlighted the need of joint cooperation in Czech-Bavarian relations especially in youth and labour market issues. Thanks to a wide range of Tandem’s experience with networking of companies within Bavarian and Czech borderland the debate focused on very practical issues of mutual cooperation such as reforms that need to be undertaken.

The next meeting was dedicated to Bayhost representative, Nikolas Djukić. The Bayhost organization supports higher level of international contacts of Bavarian universities with partner universities within the CEE region. A great proof of successful mutual cooperation was a visit in joint police station in Schwandorf. The on-site excursion and the following expert discussion with German and Czech police officers shed some light into current development of combating crime and particularly drug smuggling in the borderland.

The last part of the weekend seminar was organized as a field trip to Krušné hory. The group was led by Petr Miklíšek, collaborator of a NGO Antikomplex, into the almost disappeared former Sudeten-German village Königsmühle. The remnants of this village are officially non-existing, which makes their reconstruction or maintenance as a worthy memorial of the complicated history after WWII almost impossible. The remaining six ruins had, however, recently become a matter of interest of local activists who tries to keep this place for future generations among others through organizing land-art festival.

During Prague, Berlin, Regensburg, and Pilsen seminars, the participants got many inputs on diversity management. All topics were regularly de-briefed in the group. As the debates among the participants were highly interesting, the organizers came up with the idea of setting facilitated workshop in Pilsen in order to produce joint output by all participants on the topic.

The idea was to create a web page in the form of a multimedia dashboard gathering various inputs such as articles, interviews and videos created by this year participants. The aim of the workshop was to summarize the main findings of the CGYPP year 2014 about diversity management. What is diversity management – just a buzz word or real necessity? What are the main benefits and risks of diversity? What are the Czech/German similarities and differences in diversity management? What examples of good practices from business, politics, and civil society should be highlighted? The full-day workshop was led by Dalibor Tomko, trainer and design thinking method facilitator.

Location

Regensburg and Pilsen

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Organizer

AMO, European Academy Berlin

In cooperation with

Czech-German Future Fund, Hanns Seidel Stiftung

Official hashtag

#cgypp