The project "Counseling in Wolfsburg's Migration Society" (May 2023 - May 2024) by the Strategic Education Management and the Integration Department of the City of Wolfsburg focused precisely on these counseling services and their target group of people with a migration or refugee background. The advisory landscape in Wolfsburg - as in many other municipalities - is as diverse as the quality criteria that are intended to ensure that advisory services are provided professionally and in a trustworthy manner. This was the starting point for the project, which examined the quality of counseling services in Wolfsburg. Various data sources were used for the analysis, including documents, websites, socio-demographic target group analyses, short interviews and the participation and survey of 39 advisors and 12 management teams of advisory institutions. In this way, the project integrated different perspectives on the topic of (migration) advice in order to do justice to its complexity. In addition to an analysis of the current situation, recommendations for action with concrete measures for the Wolfsburg advisory landscape were developed.

We surveyed our migration advisors and got some exciting answers!

Our survey showed that we were right in our assumption: 88% of migration advisors mainly support those seeking advice in processing forms.

Our idea: We want to simplify these forms with the help of artificial intelligence and make them multilingual at the same time. This would not only facilitate access, but also increase the efficiency of our consultations.

We have also identified two key phenomena:
Advice hopping - Many people seeking advice visit several advice centers for the same issue.
Advice shopping - advice seekers keep looking for advice until they get what they want. This means more work for the counselor, but not necessarily more benefit for the person seeking advice!
Our solutionTo counteract these phenomena, we are planning strategic case workshops. There, the advisors do not talk about individual cases, but about complex case patterns from the advice.

The aim of the training was to create a cross-administrative understanding of participation and to impart the necessary participation knowledge, including methods suitable for children and young people. In accordance with the agreed standards, there should be contact persons for the topic of children's rights and participation in all areas of the administration. These contact persons act as multipliers in their areas and work towards ensuring that the topic of participation is given "even greater" consideration in day-to-day administrative activities and thus implemented in administrative practice in the long term. In addition, cross-administrative networking and regular exchanges between contact persons is an important step in the implementation of this strategic goal of the City of Wolfsburg.

The participants were able to contribute their previous experience with the topic of participation, but also take away a lot of information and ideas from the "best practice procedures" presented on how successful participation by children and young people can be achieved. The training content was conveyed through the application of various participation methods, so that the participants were able to get to know and try out the diversity and range of participation methods.

The training course was developed and designed by the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk specifically for administrative staff.