VIDEOS "VIENNA HEALTH AWARD 2025"

Sabine Rauscher: My name is Sabine Rauscher. I am the founder of “A G’spia fürs Tier” from Volkshilfe Wien. And we are a support project for pet owners in Vienna who have limited financial resources. We are active throughout Vienna. The requirement is, on the one hand, low income and on the other hand, that there is a problem or an emergency with an animal. On the one hand, we are here to make it possible for older people to go through rehab or a hospital stay and feel reassured that we will take care of their animals. We have a pool of 80 to 90 volunteers who are committed and provide foster homes or also support with dog-walking services. At the same time, with our current focus on older people, we also saw an opportunity to expand our volunteer pool. That is of course a huge advantage for us, because the project can also be sustained through voluntary work. And they are very valuable for us, because they have free time, and we offer them a meaningful activity by allowing them to support other people. We hope that our project will of course continue. The high number of requests for our support program proves us right. We also continue these animal trainings, and we continue to support all pet owners. And we also have quite a high number of inquiries for volunteer work, which of course makes us very happy, and we hope that we can continue to bring together many happy human-animal pairs.

Gudrun Jörgl: My name is Gudrun Jörgl. I work for the Mobile Intervention Team of Caritas Vienna. We offer clinical-psychological counseling for people in Vienna’s basic care system, funded by the City of Vienna. With the displaced people from Ukraine, the number of older people in Vienna’s basic care system has risen very, very sharply. That’s where the idea for this project arose in our team. The project “Aging with Dignity” is aimed precisely at this target group: older people, people over 60 years old in Vienna’s basic care system. The goal is really to promote psychosocial health, by creating meeting spaces through group activities where people can come into contact with each other, exchange ideas, get to know each other, and in the context of these activities also gain health-promoting knowledge, develop skills, and possibly also activate and develop new resources, in order to overall improve quality of life and enable people, far from their homeland, to age with dignity. It was possible to realize this project “Aging with Dignity” through funding from the Fund for a Healthy Austria. The overall idea was to implement the project in four Caritas facilities and then transfer this knowledge to other facilities in Vienna’s refugee aid system.

Astrid Pfeffer: My name is Astrid Pfeffer. I am a certified nurse and I head the “Network for Caring Relatives” at Fonds Soziales Wien. My team, all certified nurses, advise, train, support and accompany all those caring relatives who look after or care for a loved one in Vienna – and free of charge. We are aware that caring relatives are a support for the social and health system, and accordingly, of course, due to this so-called care work, they need support, guidance and assistance in their care situation and daily care. We started in January 2024 as part of a pilot project and since July 2025 we have been a permanent part of Fonds Soziales Wien, more precisely in the care and support services, a subsidiary of Fonds Soziales Wien. And in 2024 we were able to support and accompany around 750 clients. We support caring relatives, for example, through knowledge acquisition, that is, through modules, where we offer training, but also through exchange groups. This is very important to us, because caring relatives can connect with other caring relatives. And networking is thus promoted. Peer-to-peer support is also promoted. But we also do one-on-one training directly on site, directly at the cared-for person, for example in dealing with people with dementia, regarding communication, regarding changes in behavior, changes in personality. And here we can provide good support and guidance in all care situations.

Anita Rappauer: My name is Anita Rappauer. I work at the research office “queraum” and I focus on topics such as healthy and good aging. And in this field, together with my colleague Susu Dobner, I implement the project “Let’s Go Vienna”. The project “Let’s Go Vienna” is funded by the Ministry of Social Affairs, and it is about linking the topics of health promotion and digital participation of older people. Quite concretely, we develop interactive walks together with seniors. Interactive means that the walks are uploaded into the app “Actionbound”. This means you have the route in the app, you walk with a tablet or with a smartphone, and while walking you receive further information, can answer quiz questions or complete tasks. What is nice to observe in the project, especially during guided tours, is that people who may initially be a little skeptical and don’t like to use digital tools, at some point during a walk look over someone’s shoulder and answer a quiz question themselves or click on a link and see what additional information is available. The positive effect of the project, in my view, is really this combination of being active outdoors and, at the same time, digital learning and also acquiring something new, getting to know new things, new people, and taking a walk together.

Simon Bluma: The Häuser zum Leben of the City of Vienna are the largest provider of senior care in Austria. We have 9,000 clients and over 5,000 employees who are at work every day for our clients. Our goal is to keep the quality of life of our residents as high as possible for as long as possible. That’s why it is particularly important to us to focus on the health and health maintenance of employees, both physically and mentally. For this reason, with “LIEBer gesund” at Haus Liebhartstal we developed a package of measures, a project that aims to put employee health promotion in the foreground. Examples include coaching offers, as well as the creation of a football team across all professional groups, all hierarchy levels, and with relatives. This is also meant to enable employees to get to know each other better, understand each other better, and build more trust. Relatives and children of employees can also take part in the annual football tournament of the Häuser zum Leben, to exchange with each other and have the kinds of conversations you have on a football field, but probably not on the ward where you work, or in the office where you sit. A very sustainable concept that has shown its effect in employee retention and is truly a best practice example at the Häuser zum Leben, which we will definitely implement in all of our other houses in the coming years.

Daniela Offenbacher: Hello, my name is Daniela Offenbacher and I lead the “LernLEOs” of Samariter-Bund Wien. The “LernLEOs” are learning centers for children and young people from families affected by poverty or at risk of poverty. The “LEObox” has already existed since January 2024 in the “LernLEOs” and is a sub-project of “LernLEO” in cooperation with BAWAG Group and the Samariter Suppentopf. BAWAG employees who prepare the healthy snack that week invest about four hours of their day. First, they go shopping, then the “LEObox” snack is prepared in the BAWAG central kitchen. After that, they also deliver the snack to the respective “LernLEO” that is scheduled that week, and then they set up a nice buffet for the children. The aim of the “LEObox,” the healthy snack, is simply to provide the children with a colorful and healthy variety of foods for their snack. It is also intended to contribute to combating food poverty, as many of our children and young people are affected by it. And what also makes me personally very happy is when children and young people have the opportunity to get to know a wide variety of foods. The nice thing about the “LEObox” is of course also the social aspect, because the children come together to eat, sit together, and in this way the sense of community can also be strengthened.

Thomas Filek: Hello, my name is Thomas Filek. I am a teacher at Parhamer-Gymnasium in the 17th district, and I am pleased today to share a bit about the project “Gesunder Lebensraum Schule” or the “GLS-Woche(n).” For two years, we have established the concept of the “GLS-Woche(n).” That means that for one week, for all students at the school, that’s about 830 students, we offer workshops with external experts, who work with us to put this important topic in the foreground. It takes a year to prepare the whole program. That means we start building the concept at the beginning of the school year, asking: Are there various funding opportunities from the City of Vienna we can use? Is there a chance to bring these health topics into the school—always with the focus that it should happen in a dedicated week. The advantage: year after year, we can gather feedback from students and ask: What did you like? Or what is currently the topic of your class, or even individually, that you would like to discuss? It is very important that the school leadership supports the whole thing. The parents’ association is absolutely supportive. All teaching colleagues take part. And it is essential that really everyone who is in this school building—working, teaching, and learning, and spending a significant part of their lives here—look out for each other. And that is the community we want to foster—also with this “GLS-Woche.”

Claudia Jung: Basically, we have observed that girls, compared to boys of the same age group, are simply less physically active and also generally offered fewer opportunities to get moving or to engage in sports. “Daughters and Dads Active and Empowered” is a community-based program developed at an Australian university, and one of our partner organizations brought the project idea to us. The main goal of our project is to strengthen the self-esteem of girls by improving their physical and motor skills. The program works like this: our target group – girls of preschool and elementary school age – together with their fathers or male caregivers, are given the opportunity to take part in a nine-week play, exercise, and sports program, accompanied by two facilitators. The girls develop wonderfully. After all, nine weeks is enough time for something to happen. And this main goal of ours – that the girls simply become more confident – can be seen very clearly at the end of the program. And the fathers also report that they notice many changes in their daughters. 

Sybille Schopper: The association LOGIN, which has existed since 2002, has set itself the task with the project “Grätzlküche” of bringing health-promoting measures – particularly climate-friendly ones that protect the environment – to the local population. Our biggest part is food rescue – currently from four supermarkets – which are collected at our association’s premises and then distributed with vouchers to people affected by poverty in the district. The nutrition workshops that I lead are divided into two parts. They are not only practical cooking sessions but also knowledge transfer: How do I handle food? What does a balanced meal look like, and how can I put one together so that it is valuable for me? We were already able to rescue 85 tons of food in the first quarter of the project – that is, in half a year. Funding providers include Wiener Gesundheitsförderung, Wiener Gesundheitsfonds, the 15th municipal district of Vienna, and the Abfallvermeidungsförderungs-VKS. And from my perspective, quite clearly also the residents of the 15th district in Vienna and the participating people – from children to the elderly – who make the project possible.

Nikola Otto: “WienZimmer Gartenstadt” is a neighborhood center of FSW Obdach, a subsidiary of Fonds Soziales Wien. We are located in Floridsdorf, in a very large municipal housing complex that is somewhat of a hotspot in Vienna, where we provide social work, cultural work, and activation for the people living there. We are housed in an old space originally planned as a theater with a gallery. We had a wonderful beginning when the children discovered the “WienZimmer” for themselves and these huge rooms, which are truly impressive, and then one of them said: “Wow, I can actually do my homework here in peace.” That was really the starting point for us to set up a homework support program with “Rettet das Kind Österreich,” because people in the housing complex have very small living spaces and lack generous rooms like these. And with us, this can be very well balanced. The outcome of the “WienZimmer” that we have achieved is that we now have a very active neighborhood that not only participates in the formats we offer but also comes with their own ideas, implements projects independently, and, above all, talks about us. And I believe that’s the most important thing: that they pass on the work we do to their neighbors and friends and either refer them directly to us or, which is actually the most beautiful thing for us, act as multipliers – sharing what we’ve already told them about the city themselves, so that in some cases people no longer even need our counseling. And at the same time, everyone comes to us with all sorts of different issues. And the beautiful thing is that they leave happy, because we were able to help them.