In the last week of May, Holtzbrinck celebrated diversity and inclusion and dedicated a day to the diversity topics we care about.
On Thursday 25 May 2023, we celebrated Diversity Day 2023 internally with two exciting digital presentations and a delicious "diverse lunch" buffet. As a holding company and signatory of the Diversity Charter, we want to celebrate diversity at Holtzbrinck, in the world of work and in our society, and highlight the enrichments within.
Social background as the first topic
We started the day with a rousing talk on the topic of "social background" with Ellen Herzog from ArbeiterKind.de GmbH (https://www.arbeiterkind.de/). It is an organisation that has been campaigning for 15 years for all those who are the first in their family to study, and who come from non-academic families. It is true that social background still has a major influence on educational and career paths. ArbeiterKind.de believes that all young people should have the same chances to advance in education, regardless of their social background.
We got together to talk about current challenges and what we can all do to see "social background" as a benefit and to promote diversity in this area.
An intercultural meal!
This was followed by a joint exchange over a delicious and rich lunch buffet with delicacies from France, Romania, Italy, Turkey, Thailand and many other regions and countries. Many of our colleagues brought dishes that were linked to their origins or those of their families.
We did a little give-away to support the initiative Younited Cultures (https://younitedcultures.eu/de/), which stands for the beauty and creativity of cultures - interwoven in colourful fashion statements. Each of the sustainable and fairtrade pieces, in our case colourful socks, tells a personal success story of a migrant.
Interculturality is also at the heart of our last presentation
To conclude our internal Diversity Day, we listened to an online impulse lecture on the topic of intercultural competence by Susanne Philippsen. In her impulse lecture, Ms. Philippsen showed us what role intercultural competence plays for successful international cooperation in a multicultural society.
We would like to thank all of our speakers and colleagues for this colourful and beautiful day!
