The association imWandel e.V. is committed to a social and ecological transformation of society by providing media support and facilitating public relations for local initiatives of change. Taking into account, that local groups (voluntary projects, SMEs, associations and grass-root initiatives) already foster new approaches of sustainable living, working and social interaction, imWandel pursues the following goals: – Journalistic coverage of local initiatives in order to increase their visibility. – Building up a network between the projects and their communities – Supporting emerging projects through media and IT services. 

Despite the digital approach, imwandel has a local-based approach and is only active in regions where the association has manpower and direct networking capacity. For this reason, its website is divided into regional portals. Since 2015 the association operates the web portals for the region of Berlin and Brandenburg: berlin.imwandel.net and brandenburg.imwandel.net. Since january 2020 a new portal was launched to cover diverse projects of the region of Wendland – wendland.imwandel.ne

A regular journalistic work has been carried out on these portals, almost 1,000 projects have been mapped, of which more than 200 have tailor-made content (videos, articles…). This digital work is constantly supported by on-site presence (workshops, events, film screening). In addition to this daily journalistic work, the association undertakes selective actions and cooperations. As a media partner, IT service provider or IT consultant it is involved in various ESD projects. In recent years, the association has increasingly made these competences available to the actors of the solidarity economy and can thus demonstrate experience in various community-supported business.

Despite this very regional approach, the association is deeply influenced by a transnational and European culture and maintains active cooperation with its Italian partner “Italia Che Cambia”, and RIPESS (Intercontinental network for the promotion of social solidarity economy). The IT-Infrastructure of imwandel is used by several other projects as well, one of them only started called Farmtrain involving AMPI (Czech Republic), Eco Ruralis (Romania), Agronauten (Germany) and Agroecopolis (Greece) and being funded through Erasmus+ as a strategic partnership project. ImWandel will help building up the platform connecting established and future farmers for mentorships and topics like succession and apprenticeships in agro-ecology. Through its regular journalistic work, imWandel has direct access to a wide range of best-practice examples of sustainability in the local communities, both in Berlin, one of the most dynamic and innovative cities in Europe, as well as in neighbouring regions facing other challenges (rural exodus, unemployment…).

This broad overview of the latest developments can be shared with the other participants. In addition, imWandel offers a broad spectrum of methods from the media and IT world: – text and video journalism – Event and workshop organization – website development, including structuring of complex databases – Website administration including online mapping, – social media and community management.