Vienna Hobby Lobby

My name is Rosa Bergmann, I was born in Berlin and raised in Vienna. I've been a very ambitious, creative and curious child. After finishing art school at 19 years old, I studied my bachelor in national economics. I soon started to get interested in social policy and came across Teach For Austria, a non profit organization that fights for educational justice. I worked as a teacher in a middle school for 2 years. After one year I found a problem, that I wanted to solve and started the Vienna Hobby Lobby with some colleagues of mine. I work in that organization for 2 years now and meanwhile do my master in social economics and social labour. 

We as the „Vienna Hobby Lobby” offer free leisure program for children and young people from a disadvantaged social background. For many families leisure courses are very expensive, so that they can’t afford them. 400.000 children in Austria live in poverty and for them there is nothing to learn and discover in their free time. We organize leisure activities with the support of voluntary course instructors to inspire them and also teach them about their potential. We want them to know their strengths and interests, so that they become interested and motivate young adults. We also wanna prepare them for the challenges of the Labour market.

We tackle poverty and educational injustice, but not in the school systems, but outside of it. Many children don't have the access to leisure activities, because they are very expensive. We want them to be able to learn, find their own potential and interests as well as other kids from richer families can. Education happens everywhere and anytime and is not limited to what you learn and get to know in school. Our voluntary course instructors become role models for these children and help them discover their abilities and interests. That way we prepare them for the labour market and enhance their social skills and future competences like communication and creativity. 

The Vienna Hobby Lobby offers free leisure courses to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our target audience are children between 10 and 15 years from New Secondary Schools (Neue Mittelschulen) in the Viennese districts Favoriten and Simmering. Since we started the project in March 2019 we offered 3 course phases with 40 different courses like Street-Art, Songwriting, Acting, Dancing or Kickboxing. Our founding team consists of teachers and teaching alumni from Teach for Austria. Our personal teaching experience in school sparked the idea for implementing such a project and provided us with the right skills for its implementation. Our course instructors work on a voluntary basis and they become role models to the children. We work with enterprises to explain the challenges of the labour market to our kids and prepare them for these challenges. We want them to see their full potential and enhance social skills and future competencies. We are now starting our second location in Vienna and want to further grow in the near future. 

We enhance the motivation and social skills of these children. Through the program they get to know different children from the community, interact and build strong relationships with the others kids and the course instructors. The children enhance their skills, become more future orientated and enhance the self confidence. They begin to be amazed by their new hobbies and they can use this motivation for the school and homework as well as for the ideas they have for their future. Through the Vienna Hobby Lobby we also integrate a lot of children into the society that otherwise end up doing drugs, being abusive or ending up on difficult paths for themselves. We work with children from disadvantaged backgrounds and families that can not support their children in the best possible way. We support them with relations, free activities but also advise and help if needed. 

Within the Vienna Hobby Lobby we are impacting our community every day and making sure that no child is left behind. We work with children that usually are left behind and not taken care of. We wanna inspire these children and give them strength through social competencies in their leisure time. 

As I was teaching in school I realized that my students didn't have the abilities and access to free time activities that I had. They were bored all the time and didn't know what to do in their free time. Because of that they weren't motivated and had no aspirations for the future. They didn't know what their strengths were or what they wanted to work as when growing up. I decided that they need role models to teach them about life and different skills and possibilities for the afternoon. We wanted to 

As a child I had a lot of opportunities because my parents could support me with dancing lessons, soccer practice and piano lessons. I was supported from the groups I went to in the afternoons when my parents broke up and no longer had time for me. These free time activities became my security net and a place to stay. A lot of children have challenges at home and they need a place to be safe, welcome and happy. They need a place to forget about the world for some time, they need a place, where they can shine, enhance their talents and feel welcome. I wanna work for a project who gives that to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, because I was really privileged to have that in my life. 

I worked as a teacher for two years, so I have pedagogical competencies to work with this children. All my team mates are teachers as well and they help me to run the Vienna Hobby Lobby. Through my studies I learned a lot about financing social projects and how to run them. I am a very communicative person and that's the reason I work well with all the stakeholders involved. We were selected for some prices in Vienna, because of my burning passion for the Vienna Hobby Lobby and the vision I have for the growth of it. I wanna make sure that this project grows and helps as many children as it can. 

We had a falling out with one of our team members back in October. She was angry at me for taking the lead, didn't want to work with us no longer. She was on the way to leave our project and let me handle everything alone. At first I was really angry about her and the conflict she created, but then I tried to understand her perspective, her needs and her ideas for the Vienna Hobby Lobby. I since then tried really hard to talk to her and to include her in the way she wanted to be included. I didn't give up on her, because this project needs are very good, driven and passionate team. I'm really glad that we got over the conflict and the challenge of almost falling out with each other. We now have a very good communication and talk to each other very honestly. 

I think working as a teacher in a very challenging school describes my leadership potential best. To engage with 25 kids at the same time, leading them through the day, giving them the possibility to see their potential, teaching them how to be better and chearing for them, when they succeed, is the way to be a leader.

In my opinion, a leader doesn't need to be to one on the top, running up the hill and telling the group where to go. A real good leader is in the back, guiding everyone and making sure, the group is safe to discover on their own, make some mistakes and learn from the for the future. That is what I did as a teacher and what I still do at the Hobby Lobby. 

As former teacher of children from disadvantaged background we know exactly what our children need: a versatile, free leisure program. They want a place to feel safe and happy and can turn to every day. Often the parents don't know about the possibilities that are around. We offer an easy access through our collaboration with schools. All these factors combined led to a high demand that we currently cannot fulfill. Therefor we want to expand to a second location and further grow in the future. 

Through our program the children enhance their social competencies and furthermore the future skills that are being needed on the labour market. The benefit is that it enhances their self confidence, their willingness to learn increases as well. They are generally more motivated during school when they can relax in the afternoon. Because of their newly found strengths and interests they are more motivated to achieve something for themselves. 

At the moment we reach 600 children in the 10th district of Vienna. By next year we will reach 1000. We accompany 40 voluntary instructors and want to train even more next year.

In the next year we wanna open two more locations to reach as many kids as possible. We want to make our concept easily accessible so that other teams can start to inspire more and more kids with free leisure activities. Since the concept is very simple it can be reproduced. Currently we are working on a concept of scale for this process and we are very excited to start the Hobby Lobby in other cities and countries as well. In 5 years we want to have shaped a global community where a lot of children have the possibilities to learn more in their leisure time and to further educate themselves. 

The only barrier that exist is the financial barrier. If we had more money to spend we would open up more and more locations. But since we have been growing a lot since we started the project in March 2019, I'm not concerned that we can fundraise more money to achieve a higher impact throughout the next several years.

Fundraise more and more and start more collaborations with enterprises to finance our project. 

We work together with several schools around our location. We also work together with the Impact Hub Vienna and Deloitte. For our scaling process we are being supported by the local foundations called "Sinnbildungsstifter". We work together with small associations that specify on different hobbies. 

We impact the children and their parents from disadvantaged communities and also teachers, who teach in these communities. Our course instructors impact from our experience and the gain a lot of knowhow and skills. 

We receive funds from foundations, apply for grants and prices. Next to that we offer sponsorships and that's how we raise donations from private people.

We work together with enterprises in collaboration to bring the challenges from the labour market closer to these children and also to prepare them better for the labour market. The enterprises support us financially for these collaborations. 

We work together with enterprises in collaboration to bring the challenges from the labour market closer to these children and also to prepare them better for the labour market. The enterprises support us financially for these collaborations. We want to grow these partnerships with enterprises furthermore. We have 3 different options to partner with us, from 2.500€ to 25.000€ a year. We want to became financially sustainable in a maximum of 2 years.

10.000 € Bildünger Foundation (grant)
15.000 € Found Program (grant)
10.000 € Top 20 of Mega Bildungsstiftung (grant)
16.910 € Social Innovation Vienna (FSW) (grant)
3.000 € Social Impact Award  (grant)
15.000 € in donations

around 60.000€

We seek advise from the knowledge that you have and hope to be mentored and supported during the process of growing our organization further. 

We hope to receive advise and help in the legal or regulatory matters, as well as in monitoring and evaluation. We hope to receive mentorship and gain a board member. We already have a list of great advisors and we hope we can gain you as an advisor for our project. We would benefit a lot of the knowledge you can supply us with and hope that you can help us grow our organization further.