VIDEOS "VIENNA HEALTH AWARD 2024"

Tanja Eckhardt: Hello, Tanja Eckhardt from Volkshilfe Wien. I am the project manager for the project "Strong Girls* Good Future." The funding agency "Women Helping Women Helping" has gratefully supported this, and thus the project entered its launch phase in 2021. "Strong Girls" is a contact point located in the socio-educational shared apartments and is where the strong girls are. This means it is not localized; instead, people meet often in public spaces. We often sat in parks, drank hot chocolate, listened to music on the jukebox, and chatted. The primary goals of the project are to build self-confidence, strengthen self-esteem, and accompany the girls' lives in a non-judgmental way. The girls decide what happens. The girls determine the topics, and the program is then developed from these. The annual evaluation since 2021 has shown that the girls most want to talk to each other, go out to eat, and attend girls' meetings. Building self-confidence, strengthening self-esteem, and creating a sense of togetherness has definitely been a success. The good thing is that the project will continue; it is funded until 2026.

Birgit Radl-Wanko: Hello, I'm Birgit Radl-Wanko, Managing Director of younus – Mentoring for Children, Young People, and Families. We run mentoring programs, as the name suggests, for young people, whom we pair with volunteer mentors. They spend time together, usually for over a year. This creates positive relationships, but also perspectives and new experiences for both sides. On the one hand, we have a great collaboration with the Vienna Child and Youth Services, and work with social workers. They talk to the families and the young people. On the other hand, the younus team is also there to recruit volunteers and prepare them very well for this role. We know from a lot of research on resilience and personal development that a healthy and positive relationship has a huge impact on personal development. It's very important for the topic of self-efficacy. That's a buzzword, what does it mean? Having the feeling that I can do something, I can change something, I can make a difference. I can take control of my life. And these are the moments that young people experience through mentoring and relationships. They can then truly build on this for the rest of their lives.

Helena Hütterer: Hello, I'm Helena. I'm a special education teacher at Paulusgasse in Vienna. It's a school that exclusively serves children and young people with disabilities. Together with Elisabeth, the school social worker at our location, we founded the youth club. As part of the youth club, we go to the youth center once a month. That's come2gether, which is right around the corner from us. Our thinking was that our children and young people have very little contact with children and young people without disabilities outside of school. And we actually wanted to change that, because we believe both parties would benefit greatly from it. In general, children and young people with and without disabilities unfortunately have relatively little contact in everyday life. And we wanted to fundamentally break down prejudices or ensure that no prejudices arise in the first place. We then saw that the children and young people who attend the youth center have very little reservations about our children, and that this actually worked very well right from the start. That actually makes us very proud. And the team at come2gether, led by Martina and Mozart, welcomed us openly and warmly from the very beginning and integrated us into their program. We're delighted that the collaboration is working so well and are already looking forward to next year, when we'll be able to visit the youth center again.

Kristina Hametner: My name is Kristina Hametner. I head the Vienna Women's Health Program in the City of Vienna, in the Office for Women's Health and Health Goals. The Red Box is important to me because period poverty exists in Austria, including Vienna. This means that there are people in Vienna who cannot afford period products at all, or only with great difficulty. They then resort to unhealthy, unhygienic products, such as newspaper, toilet paper, or plastic bags. The Red Box is a pack of sanitary pads or tampons in a very pretty, special design. BIPA provides them free of charge, with 15,000 packs per month. BIPA ensures that this Red Box is on the shelf in every BIPA store throughout Vienna. I also ensure that women, girls, and other menstruating people receive vouchers that they can use to pick up a Red Box once a month from the BIPA store of their choice. We now have around 200 locations in Vienna where people receive these vouchers, which they can then use to collect the Red Box. Overall, the Red Box makes me incredibly happy because it really helps and because it also creates visibility throughout the entire project, simply taking menstruation out of the taboo a bit.

Johanna Lummerstorfer: We are the Balu&Du association. We do open children's and youth work in Simmering. The mojosa program is for children aged 6 to 14, with park supervision and a club program in the winter. The "Save Food, Have Healthy Snacks" project came about two years ago when we asked a local supermarket if we could pick up the vegetables and fruit they would otherwise throw away once a week. You then sort them and can then use the saved fruit and vegetables either to make healthy snacks to the park or for cooking. It's a really cool opportunity. It's not just—okay, we have the fruit and vegetables for cooking now—but it's about something bigger. It's about food waste, and also about how far an avocado travels before being thrown away. We will definitely continue the "Save Food, Have Healthy Snacks" project. The children respond well to it; there's active demand, and we realize how important it is. We realize that it's an important part of addressing the issue of food rescue and food waste. At the same time, we're all having fun and looking forward to many more delicious cooking events and good snacks.

Brigitte Lagler: My name is Brigitte Lagler. I am one of eleven community nurses in Vienna. We consist of two project groups. One project group is located directly at the Vienna Social Fund, in districts 11, 15, 20, and 21. And in the third district, where I am responsible, we have a cooperation agreement with the Herz-Jesu Health Park. We are an institution that works free of charge, with low-threshold access, and on an outreach basis. We are responsible for five neighborhoods and have now been able to reach a great many people through the pensioners' clubs, the district councils, and with our housing partners. Older people aged 65 and 75, in particular, do not build trust so easily. We offer anonymous consultations over the phone, and once people have gained trust in us, we also make preventative home visits, where we come to people's homes and work with them to ensure they can live in good health at home for as long as possible. It is important to say that our services do not replace, but rather complement the health and social landscape in Vienna very well.

Monika Bicsik: My name is Monika Bicsik. I am the head of a kindergarten in the city of Vienna. Our project emerged from numerous observations we made over the past two years, where we noticed that the children moved very little, were very insecure in their movements, and that during a buffet-style breakfast, food was only chosen when there was sausage and cheese available. We also noticed that the children were very restless. Our project is based on three pillars: one is physical activity.The second pillar is nutrition. And the third pillar is internal healing, that is, emotional well-being.In terms of movement, it was important for us to ensure that children could experience movement mindfully and that they could build self-confidence through physical activity. With nutrition, it was particularly important for us to guide children away from consuming lots of carbohydrates and toward eating more vegetables and fruits.Presentation matters here. We made sure that the children had nicely arranged fruit plates and nicely arranged vegetable plates. For emotional healing, our focus was on reducing screen time - away from smartphones and tablets. We wanted to minimize sensory overload in children and instead promote inner calm. At the beginning, we guided them with meditation exercises, yoga exercises, reading aloud, and relaxation. And we saw how calmly the children were then able to enjoy the rest of the day.

Lukas Küster: My name is Lukas Küster. I am a sports and health scientist and a part-time lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in the Department of Health. I am the project manager and initiator of the image video promoting an inclusive physical activity program. The image video is called “accessible.fitness – Workouts beyond Limitation.” Together with an interdisciplinary team of media technicians and prospective physiotherapists, we created an image video to promote a movement program for people with disabilities. The project unfolds in several phases. In the first phase, we were able to implement a partially accessible workout station. This was led by Mag. Amelin, a teacher at an inclusive school type SZU in Ungergasse. Students can use this facility both during physical education classes and in their free time. Calisthenics is part of everyday culture and is inaccessible to many young people and people with disabilities. This is exactly where we stepped in and found a way—both technically and through the promotion of this inclusive physical activity program—to deliver this message.

Petra Paukowitsch: My name is Petra Paukowitsch. I am the initiator and project manager of LISTEN!, a project to promote the mental health of students at the University of Applied Sciences Campus Vienna. Campus Vienna is Austria’s largest university of applied sciences, educating around 9,000 students across various fields such as health, nursing, social work, as well as construction and engineering. The starting point for our project - like for so many mental health initiatives - was the COVID-19 pandemic. I was fortunate to work with my two wonderful colleagues Susanne Mulzheim and Eva Robl, who are part of the university’s workplace health management team, to launch the LISTEN! project. LISTEN! is built on three pillars. The first is peer counseling, where we train students to provide low-threshold support to fellow students. The second is training staff on how to deal with students in stressful situations. And the third is implementing measures to strengthen the university community, social resilience, and crisis resistance. I’m incredibly happy to say at this point that LISTEN! will continue. Even after the official end of the project, we received confirmation from university leadership that LISTEN! will be internally funded for the next three years, clearing the way for us to establish a student health management system at Campus Vienna.