Our Project
„Frei­stätter Online Zeitung“

The project „#Home­l­es­sTalk“ is part of the European Union's Erasmus+-Programme, searching for „best-practise“-examples of inte­gra­tion and parti­ci­pa­tion in the field of homeless aid.

Our online magazine (the „Frei­stätter Online Zeitung“) was nominated as one of about twenty projects, thus we've written this short intro­duc­tion about our workplace.
(… may be better described as an area of opera­tions? )

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Descrip­tion of the
„Frei­stätter Online Zeitung“

The Frei­stätter Online Zeitung was founded as a local online magazine for Freistatt and its surroun­ding region. Freistatt is a 560 soul community, founded in 1899 as a workers colony in a vast swamp area and todays home of the largest insti­tu­tion for homeless aid in Lower Saxony.

About half of Freistatts residents are living here assisted and counseled by the homeless aid of the Bethel Foun­da­tion, who provides rooms, some computers and the web space for our editorial office.

Our online magazines editorial staff consists of 5 layman editors. It's main­tained extensive auto­no­mously by houseless people and volun­teers, both with former expe­ri­ences of homelessness.

We're reporting about:

• Local news, busi­nesses, insti­tu­tions and selected events of our region.
• Themes of social affairs: About home­less­ness and house­less­ness, welfare policy against home­less­ness and poverty and about general public welfare.

So we are visiting many events, meetings and confe­rences: Locally, regio­nally and national.

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Role of Peers

(Role and acti­vi­ties of peers / experts by experience)

Our elder editors have earned a broad expertise in reporting about „events“ – that can be concerts, festivals, fairs or presen­ta­tions of any kind of arts. Our second themes are workshops, meetings and confe­rences mostly of the fields of home­less­ness, poverty and other social affairs. We're docu­men­ta­ting our impres­sions there by photos, notices and sometimes inter­views, which are later trans­formed into hopefully readable articles posted on the website of our online magazine.

We are trying to transfer our know-how of many years to each newly affi­liated member of our editorial staff.

Other acti­vi­ties of our editors are image proces­sing, writing of documents, designing posters and brochures, sometimes enhancing older articles; auto­no­mously managing our website and email-boxes on a shared web-server; occa­sio­nally and then auto­no­mously acquiring and sometimes repairing used computers and technical devices for our office.

These tasks are done by our staff members always according to their personal skills – giving us a broad field for self-fulfill­ment, in contrary to the classical often passive role of poor homeless people.

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Results of operating our editorial office

Our online magazine offers work as a layman editor for homeless people of Freistatt inte­rested in writing or photo­graphy. They can practice using computers, internet research, image editing and designing websites.

With our website we estimate some added value to Freistatt and the homeless aid of the Bethel Foun­da­tion – in contrary to our non-profit status.

Since February 2018 our website gained about 616 K views from 220 K visitors during a period of 2 ¾ years. Not bad for such a small village, we think.

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Any other special information

Sorry, pages one and three of this list and most subpages are in German only.
(our main auditory was only national +Austrian since today 😉 – but translate.google.com is a handily ressource getting mostly useful trans­la­tions, as far as we've experienced)

• List of our Authors
  https://wohnungslos.info/unsere-autoren/

• Selected Articles
  https://wohnungslos.info/our-project/

• Press Articles about Frei­stätter Online Zeitung
  https://wohnungslos.info/presse-artikel/

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More Infor­ma­tions

Some Statis­tics

• ## as of mid-October 2020 – WordPress 5.5.1 powered website ##
• 2 years and 9 months with more than 99.5% online with 24/7‑accessibility
• 220.000 visitors got 616.000 views of our different webpages …
• … out of more than 750 article-posts and 47 static info-pages
• More than 7.600 edited links (distinct URLs) added to all posts and pages
• More than 10.600 distinct images added into our media library
• More than 8 Gigabyte backup-file
• Between 18 and 35 Gigabyte data-transfer from our server
  (each month during the last 2 years) 

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