Bellevue di Monaco

In the location's words:

Bellevue di Monaco is a residential and cultural center for refugee and non-refugee Munich residents in the heart of the city.
It operates and maintains three buildings, one for cultural and educational activities and two for housing nearly 50 refugees.

Bellevue di Monaco's café is organized and run together with migrants and refugees, and our menu reflects the variety of countries and culinary influences that our café team has brought to Munich.

We offer a diverse cultural program, ranging from panel discussions on topics such as migration and diversity, to films from and about the home countries of our guests, to plays and concerts with artists from around the world.

Workshop offerings include an open art studio, two sewing studios, a photography workshop, a furniture project, a bicycle workshop, and sports activities such as a running group, boxing and fitness groups. Through a cooperation with a local fashion design label, an upcycling fashion project with two permanent jobs was set up from the sewing studio.

The counseling services on various topics (general migration issues, immigration law, employment issues), as well as the support services concerning learning and language, are also highly frequented. Here, special mention should be made of the daily learning and homework help, the language partnerships, and the "A-Teams", which help with the successful completion of vocational training. All of our programs are run predominantly by volunteers, and the organization has about 10 permanent employees, most of them part-time.

Against the backdrop of the refugee crisis and a months-long debate about urban vacancies in Munich, an action alliance was formed in the summer of 2014 to bring the issue of flight and migration from the collective accommodations on the outskirts of the city to the heart of the city. Buoyed by the impressive mood at the mass demonstrations we organized in Munich against Pegida around the turn of the year 2014/2015, we founded a social cooperative in March 2015 with the goal of establishing an accommodation and cultural center for unaccompanied young refugees and interested Munich residents in the city center.

The cooperative now has more than 700 members, representing Munich's diverse and colorful citizenry - from refugee supporters, social workers and political activists to artists and politicians, lawyers and managers, and businesses. They are all united by the firm conviction that better, more humane treatment of refugees benefits us all in the long run. That we want to welcome those who are here and that isolation has no future.

Today it is more important than ever to enable refugees to truly arrive in our country in a pragmatic, unagitated and compassionate manner. Bellevue di Monaco offers the space for this - and also to be a forum for debates in which the entire urban society deals with future issues such as flight and migration, exclusion and immigration, extremism and populism.