The Bern Foundation, a foundation for sick, disabled and disadvantaged children and young people in Frankfurt am Main, found the appeal for donations from the Frankfurt Historical Museum “How will we remember the Corona pandemic in Frankfurt?” very good and right. The Historical Museum asked (and continues to ask) for people to collect together in order to remember the time of the Corona crisis in Frankfurt in the future. Since all of our projects had been shut down due to the lockdown anyway, we decided to join the appeal for donations and to make our target group aware of this project in particular.
We wrote to the special needs schools in Frankfurt, the Caritas residential groups, the FeM girls’ home and youth clubs. We soon noticed that it was incredibly difficult to reach young people in the scaled-down structures. At first, this only worked in the areas where the children and young people were still being looked after (residential groups and girls’ home), but later, when the special needs schools had reopened in a rolling system and the youth clubs were allowed to open temporarily with advance registration, it worked better and better. In the months of April, May and July, a nice collection of pictures and photos was put together.
A virtual map on Stadtlabor Digital
We have placed these in the Stadtlabor Digital on a virtual map of the city of Frankfurt under the addresses of the respective institution. In the “City Lab Digital” Users can tell their experiences and share their pictures. The site has had a “corona” category since 2020. Self-produced audio, video, image and text contributions are uploaded to the Frankfurt map and shared with the community. A growing, collaborative collection of Frankfurt knowledge is created that makes it possible to experience how people are dealing with the Corona situation.
We handed over the young people’s drawings, along with a short report on their experiences, to the Frankfurt Historical Museum as a real collection for their Corona collection.
We are pleased that so many students and young people took part and are proud that the Corona collection has been expanded to include important aspects and perspectives.
