Free welfare

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Free welfare is a pillar of the welfare state of the Federal Republic of Germany. Free welfare is understood to mean all services and facilities that are in non-profit sponsorship and are active in an organized form in the social sector and in health care . The main characteristics of their work are independence and partnership-based cooperation with the public social service providers with the aim of a meaningful and effective addition to social offers for the benefit of those seeking help. The basis of this cooperation, insofar as it is carried out by public and private bodies, is the principle of subsidiarity. It grants independent providers a conditional priority in the fulfillment of welfare state tasks.

Germany

In the Federal Working Group of Free Welfare Care (BAGFW), the six “Central Associations of Free Welfare Care” in Germany are united. They each have a large number of member associations or organizations. These central associations are:

These are non-profit organizations that promote their actions to z. B. religious (Caritas, Diakonie, ZWST), humanitarian (DRK, Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband) or political (AWO) convictions. The associations are selflessly active and do not primarily pursue economic purposes. A large number of mostly legally independent organizations work under the umbrella of the charities . Welfare associations or their legally independent sub-organizations (state, diocesan, district associations, parishes or registered associations , non-profit limited liability companies ) operate hospitals , kindergartens , old people's homes , banks such as the Bank für Sozialwirtschaft AG, pension funds such as VERKA . The Evangelical Work for Diakonie and Development and the German Caritas Association are also shareholders of the international insurance broker Ecclesia Group . The German Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband is a partner in the UNION insurance service that belongs to the group .

Well over 50% of all social institutions in Germany are sponsored by the FW. A large part of the work is done voluntarily and unpaid by people in an honorary capacity. However, the willingness of people to organize within the framework of charities has steadily decreased in recent years (“crisis of volunteering”). This may have to do with the fact that the particular values ​​represented by the individual associations are becoming less attractive (see also independent organizations ).

The German Caritas Association and the Diakonisches Werk have risen to become the world's largest private employer association over the past few decades. In the field of Christian welfare, around 1.5 million employees turn over around 45 billion euros annually. The extensive refinancing of this charitable commitment is hardly known to the population. Donations and own funds (e.g. from church tax) now serve to finance supplementary activities that are not supported by the state and result from the basic ideological conviction of the associations.

The state-desired free competition between the welfare organizations has led to an economization of the facilities in the past few years, which is again viewed critically in a study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research in 2004 ("On the shoulders of the weak").

financing

Well over 90 percent of the work of the welfare associations is financed by state funds or social insurance . Most of these are performance fees (e.g. from long-term care insurance ), but sometimes there are also flat-rate subsidies.

In the course of the global savings made by the state, the independent welfare organizations are also increasingly shifting to generating income in purely economic or at least business-related areas (e.g. running cafes for senior citizens, landscaping, etc.).

The financing of time-limited activities (projects) from a wide variety of EU funding instruments, especially since 2007 with the easier access of NGOs to European funding, is also gaining in importance for the basic funding of the work of the organizations and associations of voluntary welfare . Nevertheless, Germany is still far behind the European average, structures with the same meaning in France or Italy are comparatively more efficient in raising European funds to finance their work.
Examples are the European Social Funds (ESF) administered in the member states , but also EU action programs such as DAPHNE , LLP or Europe for citizens .

Muslim welfare in Germany

With the resolution of November 10, 2015, the German Islam Conference (DIK) declared welfare as a topic of social participation to be one of the fields of work for the current legislative period. In this context, the Muslim communities in Germany were encouraged to found their own Islamic welfare association. In 2018, An-Nusrat eV was founded as the first Muslim charity as part of the German Islam Conference.

On the basis of the DIK resolution, the umbrella organizations of the independent welfare organization, the associations belonging to the DIK, the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) with the participation of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) have a regular dialogue with the Muslim communities about implementation steps and the focus of the work is defined.

Austria

The Austrian institutions of voluntary welfare care are:

The five largest supporting organizations (Caritas, Diakonie, Hilfswerk, ÖRK, Volkshilfe) have been forming the Federal Working Group Free Welfare (BAG) since 1995 in order to articulate common socio-political concerns and to improve the framework conditions for the work of private charitable organizations in Austria. The main topics are care, social assistance, poverty, integration and childcare.

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Welfare organization  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Specialized Lexicon of Social Work, 7th edition, Nomos Verlag
  2. ↑ IW study on welfare (PDF; 2.7 MB)
  3. ^ DIK - German Islam Conference - Islamic Welfare Association. Retrieved December 14, 2019 .