Dear friends,
You helped create private accommodation for refugees from Ukraine. More than 60,000 people found somewhere safe to stay, quickly, through our project. Thank you for making this extraordinary success possible.
Today, far fewer people are fleeing Ukraine. But every day we see the terrible pictures in the media of people trying to escape their fate, above all across the Mediterranean, and pictures from the hopelessly overcrowded reception camps in many countries.
We are convinced that private accommodation can and must remain an essential part of how refugees are supported and integrated in the future.
With a donation you support our work and help refugees find safe accommodation. This is about setting the course for the future now.
What we learned, and what we call for
Over the past few years, #UnterkunftUkraine has been accompanied and studied by the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). We have distilled their academic findings, together with our own experience of housing refugees privately, into eleven key insights:
- Without private accommodation, Germany would not have coped with taking in more than 1.1 million refugees from Ukraine.
- Digital platforms are an essential part of refugee relief. We should not have to reinvent them in the next crisis!
- Offering accommodation is meaningful civic engagement, often a first step into it. Hosting must become part of the national volunteering strategy!
- Unterkunft.org holds more than 360,000 free offers in its database, across every German district. Most hosts want to help in the next crisis too!
- 55% of refugees found long-term accommodation immediately afterwards. Private accommodation helps at the moment that matters most!
- Private accommodation brings people together and provides protection, connection and orientation. Sound integration policy begins with how refugees are housed on arrival.
- Sharing a home means sharing everyday life. Accommodation is an important contribution to understanding between peoples and against radicalisation!
- Many women offer private accommodation to other women. Women play an important role in development cooperation and integration!
- Hosts have a great need for advice and for exchange with one another. Yet most of their questions are alike; a single, consistent source of information would also save the authorities a great deal of work!
- 80% of hosts would make accommodation available again in the future. Think beyond refugees from Ukraine: private accommodation can also help in disasters and in other emergencies!
- Accommodation policy is integration policy. An end to container camps, gymnasiums and expensive hotels!
Our story
The story of #UnterkunftUkraine begins on 24 February 2022 with Russia's military invasion of Ukraine. Like many people in Germany, Lukas Kunert and Falk Zientz asked themselves how they could help. Over the days, weeks and months that followed, thousands of refugees were expected; in the end, 1.1 million people fled Ukraine for Germany. The two of them quickly built a simple web form on which people could offer private accommodation to those arriving, free of charge. The idea went viral, helped by supporters such as Verena Pausder and organisations such as gut.org. Within a few days there were tens of thousands of offers.
Thousands of refugees from Ukraine arrived at the main stations in Berlin and Munich, met in many places with overwhelming solidarity. Hosts stood on the platforms holding signs and offering rooms, while no state-run placement system yet existed. Concern about abuse grew; the situation was chaotic.
How could we help as many people as possible, as immediately as possible? To put the project on a firmer footing, Felix Oldenburg of the non-profit gut.org gAG took over legal responsibility for running it. A partnership with the Boston Consulting Group brought professional support and made the system quick to scale. Working with Deutsche Telekom, a solution was built within days that allowed call-centre agents to match the details of new arrivals with suitable offers of accommodation. This semi-automated process was complemented by free identity verification for hosts and a check against the sex offender register. The Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) supported the project, promoted it as a private accommodation solution and provided call-centre capacity.
Within the first week alone, close to 100,000 beds in private homes were registered on the platform. In the end, accommodation was successfully arranged for more than 60,000 refugees.
The funding of #UnterkunftUkraine was marked by an unusual ability to mobilise support, and by independence. With betterplace.org as its donation platform, broad media coverage and the support of PR agencies, the initiative raised more than three million euros in donations. Those funds, together with extensive pro bono resources and a deliberate refusal of financial dependency, in particular on state funding, secured the project's independence.
Despite its initial success and the rapid placement of tens of thousands of people in private homes, the project ran into structural obstacles after a year. The approach works particularly well in the phase before refugees are registered and begin receiving municipal support. Over time, however, it became harder to place new arrivals in private homes, because after registration most of them remain in arrival centres and the federal states increasingly seek to distribute them according to the Königstein Key. While there were successes at federal level and in cities such as Munich, cooperation with the states remained difficult, as they feared losing control over how refugees are distributed. The involvement of local welfare associations, which often pursued financial interests of their own, further complicated the integration of #UnterkunftUkraine into state refugee policy. Many offers of accommodation, especially in rural areas, went unused, while many refugees continued to wait in arrival centres for better housing.
Permanently embedding the unique and still new resource of private accommodation into state refugee policy therefore remains a task for the future, for gut.org, for civil society and for the large community of hosts.
Best regards, your team at Unterkunft.org