#socialdigital for cultural participation in Upper Franconia's retirement homes

Enabling seniors in residential care to participate in society in the same way as other population groups is generally a great challenge. Corona-related measures such as contact and exit regulations further restrict the possibility of participation, make social contacts and also access to cultural offerings more difficult. Ultimately, they have a negative impact on psychological well-being. With the #sozialdigital initiative, Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung wants to counteract this situation and enable residents of inpatient facilities to participate a little more in culture and thus also in society. The idea: cultural programmes such as musical or theatrical performances are recorded and made available to residents interested in culture in the form of approx. 25-minute videos. As part of the #sozialdigital project, which is being implemented with the support of committed artists and the district of Kulmbach, eleven senior citizens' homes are each being equipped with a tablet to play the culture-mediating videos. To kick off the initiative, a symbolic tablet handover took place today, Wednesday 30 June 2021, at a press conference in the BRK Bürgerhospital with District Administrator Klaus Peter Söllner.

Press conference at BRK Bürgerhospital to launch the #socialdigital initiative

Today, Wednesday 30 June 2021, was the day: the symbolic handover of the tablet at the BRK Bürgerhospital marked the start of the #sozialdigital initiative. "With this project, which was initiated by my colleague and foundation chairman Prof. Manfred Gareis and which was developed in cooperation with committed artists and the district of Kulmbach, we are pursuing the goal of bringing cultural offerings into Upper Franconia's senior citizens' homes. We also want to enable their residents to participate in culture and thus counteract the loneliness caused by the pandemic," says Florian Schneider, Director of the Social Foundation at Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung. The idea: cultural programmes such as musical or theatrical performances are recorded and made available to senior citizens interested in culture in the form of approximately 25-minute videos. In order to be able to use the cultural mediation offer, a total of eleven Kulmbach senior citizens' homes were each provided with a tablet as part of the project. "Thanks to the loan tablets, social and cultural participation can be integrated even more strongly than before into the everyday life of the home - completely flexible in terms of time and completely independent of the mobility of the residents. For them, #socialdigital opens up completely new and, above all, crisis-independent communication channels," says District Administrator Klaus Peter Söllner. In addition to local press representatives, Bettina Schüsser, facility manager of the BRK Bürgerhospital, BRK district manager Jürgen Dippold and Christina Flauder, senior citizens' representative of the city of Kulmbach, District Administrator Klaus Peter Söllner also took part in the press conference. With Heike Söllner, Head of KoBE at the Kulmbach District Office, the board members Florian Schneider and Prof. Dr. Dr. habil. Manfred Gareis of Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung and the artists involved in the project, the funding partners and project initiators were also represented.

Partner project for cultural participation in Upper Franconia's retirement homes

The idea for the #sozialdigital initiative came from two existing projects. The first was the "CLASSIX!" project initiated last year by Ingo Dannhorn and implemented with the support of Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung , which brought the classical music of the pianist to senior citizens' homes. On the other hand, the project "5 minutes of culture to listen to" of the Kulmbach District Office, in the context of which cultural workers of the region mediate a wide variety of cultural offers on the telephone. Due to the positive response to both projects, Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung , with the support of pianist Ingo Dannhorn, the artist duo Wolfgang Krebs and Lorenz Trottmann from the Thurnau Castle Theatre and the picture storyteller Rüdiger Baumann, set itself the task of further developing the two concepts to enable cultural participation even more comprehensively in times of lockdown in inpatient facilities. With the idea for #sozialdigital, the foundation was able to win the district of Kulmbach as a cooperation partner, which supports the project not only in terms of content and organisation, but also financially, with five of the eleven tablets that were funded. As head of the Coordination Centre for Civic Involvement, Heike Söllner is also concerned about the success of the initiative with regard to volunteering: "It would be a real enrichment if #sozialdigital resulted in even more volunteering in senior citizens' facilities - perhaps even attracting more young people with an affinity for digital media. Because strengthening generational cohesion, opportunities to meet and the message that we don't forget our elders and that they have a place in society is more topical than ever."

Varied programme: Committed artists provide entertainment

Three 25-minute videos of the artists involved in the project are already available. Ingo Dannhorn, for example, will participate with two videos of his piano concerts, while the picture storyteller Rüdiger Baumann entertains in his video "Kleinlosnitz" with a walk through the Upper Franconian farm museum there and ties in his stories to traditions and experiences from the old days. The selected melodies, pictures and videos have a not too complex content and create a wide range of association points with the aim of enlivening the presence events with conversations about personal memories of the audience. With poems, verses and songs by the great German lyricists and humourists of the last century, the two-part programme "Humour is in the Air" by actor Wolfgang Krebs and musician Lorenz Trottmann delights. The artistic duo from the Schlosstheater Thurnau thus offers a cheerful and contemplative programme to laugh, smile and pause, full of fantasy, wit and wisdom.