Statementin response to accusations of abuse of power and lack of self-reflection against the Initiative Awareness e.V. (as at: 05.04.2024)
We have heard from various sources that our cooperation partner Ann Wiesental is voicing criticism of us to a wider public. This criticism does not relate to our work in terms of content, but mainly to the sponsorship and organization of our project "support f(x) - Interface for Awareness". We have now decided to make this statement in response to the public criticism against us in order to make it clear that there are different narratives and that we do not simply want to accept the accusations against our team.
The project "support f(x) - Interface for Awareness, Anti-Discrimination and Violence Prevention" has been running since July 2021 and is funded by the federal program "Live Democracy!" until the end of this year. Since its launch, responsibility for the project has been with the Awareness Initiative, which initiated the project and, as an association, provides the supporting structure for its organizational implementation. In addition, there has been close cooperation with Ann Wiesental as an individual and with awareness groups from German-speaking countries, in particular the Berlin group rave.awareness, from the start of the project. Ann Wiesental and others have strongly supported the application phase of the project in 2021. Their expertise flows into the project and enriches it.
Over time, however, it became apparent that the intended cooperation was not working as intended on a communicative and organizational level. This increasingly led to conflicts and hardening, which resulted in a mediation process that did not lead to any results. We attribute this failure to the fact that we failed to clearly define roles and decision-making powers at the start of the project. In addition, there were obviously different visions of where the project should go. For us as an association and employees of the association, for example, there was no question of the project becoming an Awareness Institute within its lifetime.[1] within its duration. However, Ann Wiesental later expressed this wish to us.
Ultimately, the ideas regarding the structure of the cooperation proved to be incompatible at various levels, forcing us to scale back the level of cooperation with some partners[2 ] on organizational issues. This was a necessary reaction for us in order to limit the burden on our employees and to be able to continue our work. In its hardened form, the conflict is very stressful and burdensome for us and repeatedly prevents us from carrying out our work and our commitment in the area of awareness and anti-discrimination in a way that makes us feel good.
However, the fact that we separate ourselves from individuals at an organizational level does not change the fact that we see "support f(x) - Interface for Awareness" as a networking project. We want exchange and cooperation and have been putting this into practice for 2.5 years. As a project, we are in close contact with numerous awareness groups and projects with similar goals. Our project advisory board, consisting of self-advocacy organizations, is a firmly established body that has been advising us since the start of the project. Ann Wiesental has been part of this advisory board up until now. We also support groups and projects with the project's financial resources and organize joint events. We also obtain further training from partners and make our knowledge available to others. As a supporting association with a now established administrative structure, we also support the 'Anlaufstelle Nord/Süd' project, which serves to promote the Awareness Institute. Since the beginning of 2022, we have assumed full financial and legal responsibility for this project, while the content is in the hands of the project staff and the volunteer members of the Awareness Institute. It is our wish to continue working with the Awareness Institute.
In addition to the criticism of the separation from project partners, Ann Wiesental has a second accusation against us. This is that we were not prepared to engage in self-reflection following the conflict. This accusation is very serious in the context of awareness work, as the willingness to self-reflect is an elementary component of awareness practice. We would therefore like to state that this accusation in no way corresponds to our perception.
As employees and as an association, we are extremely concerned about the escalated conflict. We wanted a constructive and productive collaboration with Ann Wiesental and other partners and, from our perspective, made many efforts during the course of the conflict to return to this. For example, there was a discussion with the former steering committee and the entire team from Leipzig and Berlin, two mediation sessions with numerous preliminary and individual discussions, coaching for the team that focused exclusively on this case, various individual discussions (verbally and by email) between team members and Ann Wiesental and various plenary and crisis meetings within the team at which the question of the right way to deal with the situation was discussed in depth. Part of all these discussions was always to allow criticism of our behavior and to recognize mistakes in communication.
We have now decided to make this statement in response to the public criticism against us to make it clear that there are different narratives and that we do not want to simply accept the accusations against our team. Please contact us if you have any questions or need more detailed information. You can reach us at the following e-mail address: fragen@initiative-awareness.de.
