Purpose: The Welcome and Inclusion Day aims to bring together the City, civil society organisations and professionals for a day dedicated to discussion and collaborative development on issues of hospitality and inclusion. It enables the target audience to discover local resources, welcoming initiatives and existing opportunities for engagement in Strasbourg, whilst fostering encounters and the forging of links between residents, organisations and institutions. For professionals, it is a morning devoted to a series of themed workshops on the key aspects of inclusion (language learning, access to employment, culture, participation, voluntary work, ...) to discuss best practice and identify ways to improve access to rights within the region.
Stimulus/rationale: the professional meetings initiated by the City have been in place since 2018 with the development of the ‘hospitality city’ initiative. The ‘Welcome to Strasbourg’ forum has been organised since 2023 by the local association ‘Tunaweza’ with the support of the Foyer Notre Dame association.
The initiative in 2025 was to bring these two events together to create a single comprehensive day so that all stakeholders – professionals and volunteers, those directly affected, and residents – could come together to address the same challenges: raising the profile of a welcoming region.
Process:
The City of Strasbourg, through the ‘Mission Ville Hospitalière’, the Tunaweza association and the Foyer Notre Dame association, join forces every year to organise the ‘Hospitality and Inclusion Day’ alongside local partner organisations.
The Day is usually divided into two parts:
- A morning session for professionals dedicated to networking amongst those involved in welcoming and inclusion, through collaborative workshops. These workshops enable participants to share experiences, identify common needs and work together to devise practical solutions to improve the reception and inclusion of displaced people.
- An afternoon in the form of a forum offering a friendly and informative event open to all new arrivals: asylum seekers, refugees, students, expatriates, social workers and anyone else who is interested.
The areas of work covered by the organisations present range from reception to inclusion (access to rights, healthcare, digital access, learning French, employment, training, social and cultural life, sport, volunteering, etc.)
Impact:
In 2025, the event brought together more than 40 civil society and institutional organisations and welcomed over 110 participants in the session for professionals, as well as more than 250 people at the Forum in the afternoon, featuring 40 stands dedicated to welcoming and inclusion (access to rights, healthcare, digital access, learning French, employment, training, social and cultural life, volunteering, etc.)
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