We are a socio-cultural center!
The Schuhfabrik stands for social, cultural and political work. We support people in their efforts to be able to deal with their issues and problems independently. The committed involvement of the Schuhfabrik in a wide variety of working groups at the local and national level shows that the socio-cultural center is well networked.
Learning together, questioning the given and developing alternatives is the method and goal of the Schuhfabrik. We work together with the groups we have initiated, in the numerous projects and with cooperation partners in this spirit and achieve a lot.
Some of our approaches have made a difference and have received broad recognition and publicity, others have fizzled out. But the Schuhfabrik has retained the courage to experiment and everything is a constant learning process. Nevertheless, and precisely for this reason, the Schuhfabrik continues to provide impulses and initiate projects to bring people into engagement with society using artistic and cultural forms.
A city like Ahlen, in which people live with structural change (as a former mining town) and the diverse social developments, needs this socio-cultural center.
The Schuhfabrik is also an intercultural center!
This focus of the house arose from the social commitment to people with a refugee background. Shaped by encounters with people from different cultures, the position of the Schuhfabrik has developed steadily since 1993. We all had intensive discussions on the subject area during the three-year European project Xenos on "intercultural competence transfer" from 2001 to 2003. This was followed in a very practical way by dealing with the "intercultural opening of the association" in the years 2004 to 2006 and the project "Cultural diversity - lived diversity" from 2015-2018.
It is and remains important to us to provide the framework for open encounters, to promote foreignness competence and to strengthen self-confidence. Difference is the source of creativity and inspiration. Dealing with difference is an essential principle in our socio-cultural practice.