WVPU undergraduate psychology student Anna Soińe brings her “Interchanging Opportunities” project to the table. She tells us about her plan of action and what inspired her project.
By Bridget Carter
April 2019
The University of Vienna’s main ceremonial chamber of stucco marbled walls and fresco ornamentation held its full capacity of spectators on March 29 for Vienna’s fifth Humanitarian Aid Congress. In her opening remark, Director of Global Responsibility Annelies Vilim proclaimed “humanitarian aid is not an act of charity, it is a human right”, thus encapsulating the very essence of the Congress itself.
Organized by five organizations, including Caritas and the Austrian Red Cross, the Humanitarian Aid Congress aimed to bring together international stakeholders in the fields of humanitarian aid, business, politics, media, and academia to discuss recent developments and future visions of humanitarian aid. Panel discussions centered around topics such as the increasing numbers of vulnerable populations, climate change, geo-political shifts, and emerging technologies.
The opening ceremony consisted of Austrian Federal Minister Karin Kneissl’s welcome note urging that humanitarian aid should not be seen as a substitute for political solutions, while Mark Lowcock, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, addressed three big challenges to humanitarian aid today: how to better deal with mass displacement and climatic-induced crisis, and the importance of addressing causes rather than symptoms of problems. “If we continue to work around the symptoms, the problem will get worse,” proclaimed Lowcock in his keynote address.
Later in the afternoon, the student-based Humanitarian Aid and Future Generations panel, moderated by Webster’s Dr. Samuel Schubert, addressed crucial humanitarian challenges generated by climate change, armed conflict, and famine while posing the question: Will future generations engage more in or withdraw from humanitarian efforts as a lost cause? Student panel-members came from a number of schools including the University of Vienna, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, and Webster Vienna Private University.
One of WVPU’s very own, undergraduate psychology student Anna Soińe, presented her project “Interchanging Opportunities" that aims to bring together two socially marginalized groups — refugee children and the Austrian elderly — to manage their (re-)integration process into Austrian society. The idea of Soińe’s project is to provide a local platform to connect refugee children in need of guidance, support, skills, and knowledge with the elderly in need of company, activity, and purpose. By doing so, migrant youths are better able to integrate and contribute to society, while the elderly are better able to regenerate a sense of purpose and combat loneliness.
How does this look in practice? With the cooperation of local institutions and educational facilities, “Interchanging Opportunities” can reach participants via social media campaigns, local humanitarian aid services, care facilities, and people living in communities, all of which require very little financing. By posing the question: “What can we, the normal population, accomplish?” Soińe approaches migrant integration not as an insurmountable problem, but rather as an issue that the community can engage in and improve together.
Soińe came to WVPU from Germany to study psychology with a minor in international relations. She has been engaged in projects working with disabled children, refugee children, and language tutoring for migrant adults. It was these very projects that inspired “Interchanging Opportunities.”
Soińe was drawn to the idea of focusing on the elderly because “society is aging and the elderly can be extremely lonely,” she says. “How can we help them?” With this question in mind, she believes that the aging population are excellent candidates for helping migrant children integrate. “We can only continue to help people and solve humanitarian problems if we are a stable society,” she says. “But we can’t be a stable society if we don’t talk to each other and tackle our own issues.” Her plan of action is a way to bring people together from both generational ends of the spectrum and reinforce community ties in order to sustain a more stable society.
“People need to contribute to society, but how does one do that if they are not integrated?” She rhetorically asks. “We need to do something right now.” And we, the average people, can do something right now. We can start by talking to each other and to our neighbors. “We as citizens can talk to our neighbors to encourage long-term growth,” she encourages. For, at the end of the day, “we are all humans.”
Bridget Carter, the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of World Dip magazine, is an International Relations graduate student at Webster Vienna Private University where her areas of focus include gender and migration and post-conflict development. Her background in the field of forensic science and journalistic writing give her a unique perspective from which to approach various topics of international relations. Her written work has been featured in Austin Monthly magazine, The Chronicle, and The Ten-Twenty. She also rocks a (very raw) personal travel memoir blog There She Goes travels[dot]com. Bridget has trekked the Markha Valley in the southern Himalayan Region, sailed the Mekong River from Thailand into Laos, and traveled and lived in her 1986 Mini-Cruiser camper in the desert of West Texas. Her grit and passion make her one hell of a story teller.
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