Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION PROJECTS FROM WHOOSH

We are an activist collective, and campaign for social justice, using unusual tools, and humour. There is a resurgence of right-wing conservatism in Europe now, and we resist this, as progressive liberals. We stand for feminism, Europe, ecology, and against homophobia and racism.

Schools and universities are an important opportunity to meet people from different cultures, and this is too often overlooked. And of course, education should also be about how we can live together, respect each other, and fight for an open, democratic, modern society. Where subjects are missing from the curriculum, so parents can step in and deliver those ideas - on critical-thinking, creativity, anti-racism and political insights. We have more in common, than that which divides us. As Rebellious Optimists, we look for solutions, joy, and the good in people.

Whoosh's philosophy can be summarised with a Venn Diagram, showing a sliver where fun and politics meet. With play and jokes, we can say unusual things, and reach new audiences with our message. Culture is central to that joy - music, food, dance, art and play.

We see our home town of Vienna as an interesting alternative model to the turbocapitalism of London or New York. It works, is expanding fast, but has a big heart and supports all communities. Lots of free culture, excellent public transport, and free Kiga and university. And with groups like Caritas Wien, there is creative presentation of the values of migrants. We are big fans of the language course they run, which looks like a cooking course, thus skipping around the patriarchal scepticism of wives learning German.

Encouraging a feeling of belonging and inclusion is important for migrants just arriving. We have so many jobs here that few Austrians want to do, and yet the national government sends out a very hostile message to immigrants. We non-Austrians are not allowed to vote, and well, Vienna is not the friendliest place to build your social circle. So we create events where it is easy to meet each other, and get into conversation.

Eugene made a tour recently with a group of mostly Syrians, and when we saw an exhibition of post-war photographs of Vienna in ruins, they saw something different to the rest of the group - hope that their own country can be rebuilt, like Wien, and there are possibilities there.

Sport and music offer valuable and influential ways that black and other minority groups can become more visible and cool. We should not underestimate the power of these two media. Without migration since 1971, the population of Vienna would now be 1.2m people, instead of a more dynamic 2 million residents. And the autochthon population would be very old, which Vienna definitely is not.

Coming from outside is both a problem and part of the solution. We Immigrants do not always know the cultural rules and traditions, but that presents opportunities, since many Austrian rules really should be broken. You may have read about Eugene's dispute with the Wirtschaftskammer Wien, which he won. Both media and public decided that the rules on who could make creative tours in Wien needed to change. He is now the best known tour guide in the city. It is important to say here, that being a straight, white, English-speaking man helped a lot.

UNUSUAL COMMUNICATIONS, AND MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES

21st February is Unesco Mother Tongue Day. Everybody is encouraged to speak their first language or dialect. We asked Wiener Linien to use this cool event to promote how diverse their team is, with drivers speaking 26 home languages. They would say Hallo in their native tongue, to the passengers, on this morning. But they said no in 2016. Indeed, Whoosh has had many rejections from groups who just were not adventurous or playful enough to open up to new ideas and impulses.

Our Expat vs Immigrant project is a speech format, where two migrants compare their experience, with one judged an expat (professional, rich, welcome) and the other, an immigrant from a poorer country, judged as unwelcome, problematic and contributing little. Often, the opposite is true.

1st November is an important day each year for Austrians to remember their dead, and visit graveyards. Caritas Wien invited Eugene to recognise this event, and show how we might be able to contribute more after we die. We suggested a tour of Zentralfriedhof, where we look at the memorial rituals of different religions, and created a tour called How to Die Better. Caritas want more people to use their wealth to create social change after they die, instead of giving money to their wealthy children, or building a pompous gravestone. The tour was very popular, until Wiener Bestattung banned it in 2024.

The European migration crisis of autumn 2015 offered both opportunities for the far-right to increase anxiety, and ways that progressives could show hopeful and positive messages. At the time, Eugene was working for the west-Vienna public space charity, space and place, and responded to the media debate about integration with a provocation, How to be Austrian. Ö1 made more than 40 short films where migrants explored the key ways to be more Austrian. The project was in German, and in fact the real audience was not those folks arriving in on buses and trains and on foot from middle east, but instead the angst-monkeys on social media, in Kärnten and niederösterreich. We won both an Innovation Preis from the Austrian Radio Awards in Rathaus 2016 (Eugene was sat next to ÖVP's Blumel and ORF's Elisabeth Stratka, in the front row). We also got a Leopold Ungar Preis, for politically-innovative journalism.

When Vienna Design Week announced that their 2023 location would be Leopoldstadt, we locals proposed the Austrian Staatsbürgerschaftsprüfung as a pub quiz. Design Week moves Bezirk every year, which is ambitious and complex. We staged these events in co-operation with Erste Stiftung, Caritas Wien and Design Week. We wanted to approach the integration debate from a new perspective, to see how integrated the Austrians themselves are. Not so much, we discovered.

Our media storytelling is something fresh and hopeful. Eugene has never separated his own experience from the projects he makes, He mixes up his work and life, and encourages others to do the same. Because of our unusual way of working, we were invited by the Diplomatische Akademie to show a group of visiting Americans the new diversity of Vienna, which is something different from a diplomatic training school.

ÖBB has created a group, Vielfalt Begegnen, to open up their message to a wider, more diverse, audience, and invited Whoosh, along with Human Rights Commissioner Shams Asadi, and the VIDC Gender Tandem Workshops für Männer - to present an evening of creative new ways to reflect diversity in our society, in April in their HQ near Praterstern (not a public event, sadly).

BEING A POLITICAL DJ IN THE CAPITAL OF MUSIC

Even though so much great music was created in this city, there is very little sound on the streets of Wien. Eugene is trying to fix this tragedy, with worldwide tunes to bring the city alive. We need new soundtracks to reflect a changed population. He was invited to enliven a Vienna-Vietnam wedding in a castle in 2019, between two boys. And did weeks of research to get exactly the right songs for the entire wedding party.

For the Magdas Hotel baustellefest in 2014, he played the music of the refugees' homelands, and has done that often since, on the Hotel's birthday.dj and birthday fest. Music is politics and joy, and dancing a release of energy and love.

Read more about his Music Safari, to see how he uses DJ events to create alternative political messages.

SOCIAL DINING

Vienna Coffeehouse Conversations is the oldest event from whoosh.wien and previously space and place (a public space charity created by Eugene, Monika, Brigitte and Leo in 2012). First staged in Wien Museum, and financed by Wien Kultur, it brings together people from Vienna and around the world in intimate conversation, for 2 hours, with a question menu. So far, peo0ple from 79 countries have sat together to build bridges and fight the loneliness crisis in modern cities. The question menu has been adapted for Magdas Hotel (big Syrian buffet with former refugees meeting Viennese and hotel guests), for the UN offices in Wien to meet long-term residents of teh city, and for inter-generational dialogue at European Forum Alpbach.

And in future, the revolutionary Gefilte Flak will help right some of the wrongs of the Shoah, re-creating Kosher Vienna food for a new generation, and bringing together communities in modern conversation. New for 2025, is the Soul Food Safari, where we show the contemporary diversity of Vienna, through its food scene, eating a 3-course meal in three different restaurants, where we speak with cooks from Peru, Ethiopia and Cambodia about how they had to change their food, to sell it to Austrians.

Each month, our Wien Museum Pub Quiz reflects new exhibitions in the Museum, allowing us to reflect contemporary social issues through the fun medium of a a pub quiz, with fine cake and wine up on the roof of the museum. The event sells out all eighty places each month, showing how much interest there is on our formula of mixing fun and politics. Themes covered so far: Democracy, Climate Change, Feminism and Mixed Identities.

USING ANNIVERSARIES PRODUCTIVELY

Never Again is a message which too many people are forgetting! Some people are not reading good history books, and allowing disinfo online to increase their anxiety and rage, but not to inform them about facts. Memorial culture is about so much more than just sculptures - it is there in songs, demonstrations, films, newspaper articles, posters, a visit to Mauthausen, well-presented archives and museums like the Shoah Museum in Berlin or the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, novels, living books - showing modern remembrance. Anniversaries are probably the most powerful tool we have in this period.

On Tag des Denkmals, we make an extended Jewish memorial culture tour right through Vienna. On UN Mental Health day, we lead a tour exploring the pioneers of psychoanalysis, for the Austrian Psychoanalytical Association. On our walk about why Vienna is judged most liveable city in the world by Economist Intelligence Unit, we celebrate Secession, as a symbol of the connections between neural divergence and great creativity. There is always was room in Wien to think differently. And for our Gay tour on Rainbow Day, we show the value of Ampelpärchen as a symbol of the new Vienna - open, tolerant, modern. Pride is held in June, because of the Stonewall riot on Christopher Street, NYC, in 1969.

WALKING

We are entering a period of resistance against an intolerant new Austrian government, and all over central Europe. Who stands firmly against this development? The European Union, and so we show all of the ways Brussels has positively influenced Vienna on a walking tour, on the thirtieth anniversary of Austria joining.

On our Midnight tour, every July, we show how Wien becomes so much more friendly in the night-time, compared to midday. Part fo the reason for this is that there is much less German spoken in the hours of darkness. We immigrants go to bed much later than the autochthon.

In April and October of 2022, we made free welcome tours for the new Ukrainian refugees in our city. And for many years, we have made tours on UN Tag der Flucht, taking some of the FPÖ culture budget in Simmering (when that was Wien's only blue Bezirk) to tour the Jewish part of Zentralfriedhof, then FC Karabakh (an Azerbaijani sport club) and onto the glorious worldwide party at Macondo refugee camp (Europe's oldest).

With colleague Persy Bulayumi, Eugene created a History of Racism tour of Vienna, showing that there has always been a demonised group of outsiders in our city - but that group changes all the time.

New in 2025, we will create several tours for ViennaUP start-up festival, showing useful ways our hometown is adapting itself to become more accessible for everybody. These tours are free in May, in collaboration with the beautiful Wirtschaftsagentur Wien - a much more progressive alternative to the ugly Wirtschaftskammer Wien, who oppose all progress in our city, and seem to have collapsed the coalition talks between SPÖ, NEOS and ÖVP, leading to a new far-right phase in Austrian politics.

Whoosh has always been proudly feminist, and so we have a whole page about our engagement with gender justice and events all over the city to tell new stories about the value also for men in discovering feminism. Among our projects are a walk with the city-planning and development of Stadt Wien, showing pioneering ways Vienna has re-thought city finances to include women's and girls' needs at every stage (thanks to Eva Kail). We will make a tour with Eva about this in 2025. And our feminism for men tour, in October this year. Wien has a female soul, finds Eugene.

Walking is valuable free medicine and also a business tool, for solving problems and developing better ideas. Use it! Exploring the city on foot is also the most sustainable form of urban mobility, and we must do everything to avoid climate collapse. Climate justice is social justice. Poor people around the world are mot affected by climate chaos, and in future we will see hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and food and water prices many times higher than they are now.

BRINGING PROGRESSIVE MESSAGE CREATIVELY TO WIDER, MORE DIFFICULT TO REACH AUDIENCES

Meet the Community is an innovative social event, where Whoosh takes integration to street markets in Wien, and interviews a representative of various migrant groups each week, asking about where and how they live, why they left their birth country, what they like about their new home town, challenges in integrating, we hear some poetry and music from their homeland, but also about where the best food is, which jobs they do, a little politics, what they miss from home, and how they got to Wien.

Our Body Language is a cooperation with Brunnenpassage, where we interview (auf Deutsch) representatives of different communities in Wien - on the Ö3 stage at Donauinselfest. And then they show us a dance from their homeland, and the audience is encouraged to copy the style. We must embrace the TikTok generation with all the opportunity that dance holds for intercultural exchange.

#kommraus - Forum Öffentlicher Raum was our attempt to show, in cooperation with MA 18, the value of public space in creating dialogue between different groups in Vienna. We have excellent public realm in our city, and it is improving every year. With this series of events, we wanted to show the value, possibilities and range of spaces we have here.

Youth Art Takeover is a future fantasy project, where kids take over a big, central gallery for one weekend, and make tours in their home languages, for not so easy-to-reach parents and friends, and get them into big art in central Wien. They will sing, dance, spray-paint - and show the wonder and freedom that youth bring to creativity.

Whoosh’s projects in Wien are visible internationally because of our extensive media coverage, regular appearance in academic research papers on social innovation, tours for visiting government representatives from around the world, and invitations to speak at and enliven conferences across Europe (and also to Bloomberg's prestige, invite-only CityLab Aspen conference of changemakers, which eugene could not attend, since he stopped flying 14 years ago).