What does the Awareness Team stand for?
What are we striving for?
Protection and freedom for all:
Everyone should feel safe and respected at Holzmarkt. Each person should be able to freely express their personality, as long as they respect the boundaries of others.
Clear stance against discrimination:
Holzmarkt rejects all forms of discrimination – e.g. racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, or antisemitism. These principles are non-negotiable.
Social change through awareness:
The goal is to foster a conscious approach to power, discrimination, and sexualized violence – mistakes can happen, as long as learning follows.
Three-pillar model:
The Awareness Working Group operates in the areas of prevention, support, and transformation – in other words: preventing, helping, and driving change.
Core principles of the work:
Confidentiality, anonymity, solidarity with those affected, the right to define (the affected decide what happens), and appreciation are essential.
Wide range of support:
The group offers conversations, mediation, accompaniment to external support services, and help with internal conflicts or overwhelm.
Open, diverse group:
The Awareness Working Group consists of employees from different areas – independent of position or hierarchy – and is open to new participants.
Good training & accessibility:
Members are trained in awareness basics, anti-discrimination, and related topics. Contact is possible via email or an anonymous online tool.
Continuous development:
Awareness work is an ongoing process. Feedback, ideas, and shared learning are explicitly encouraged.
1. What does awareness mean at Holzmarkt
Protection and freedom of each individual are central, so that all visitors and employees can feel as safe and respected as possible.
The aim is to create a space where everyone can express their personality freely, while respecting the boundaries and space of others.
2. Which structures do we want to break
The aim is to break with all forms of discrimination, whether racism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, antisemitism, hostility toward religion, discrimination based on nationality or ethnicity, ableism, ageism, lookism, exclusion of sex workers, unhoused people, and more.
These principles are non-negotiable. Through awareness work, active steps are taken against discrimination and sexualized violence, with the goal of fostering sustainable social change.
The goal is to create spaces where mistakes can be made and used as learning opportunities. At the same time, there is an expectation of willingness for critical self-reflection.
There is awareness of the patriarchal structures in society, where all forms of discrimination and disadvantage, whether conscious or unconscious, persist and are reproduced. Simple exclusion and isolation of individuals does not foster change, but can lead to problematic behavior continuing elsewhere. This work seeks to counteract that.
Nevertheless, serious violations of these principles can result in consequences, including exclusion from the team.
Holzmarkt is already a place committed to diversity and works collectively to further this transformation.
The Awareness Working Group also supports, within its capacity, crises and conflicts that are not directly related to awareness issues.
3. Principles of the Awareness Working Group
The group works with the “three-pillar model” of prevention, support, and transformation.
The most important principles of this group are confidentiality, safeguarding anonymity, the right to define, solidarity with affected persons, and appreciation.
→ Our goals: create a point of contact, enable agency, build a “safer space,” and offer multiple options for action.
“Central to this position is the understanding that awareness is not only about the interpersonal level, i.e. not only about empowerment and support of those affected, but that this level is always considered together with the societal one.”
“It is also about changing ourselves, our interactions, and our ways of relating to each other, and becoming aware of our own entanglement in systems of domination – to understand our individual social behavior against the backdrop of societal structures.” Quoted from Ann Wiesental, “Anti-sexist Awareness”
4. Who does the awareness work
The Awareness Project Group consists of people from different areas and hierarchy levels at Holzmarkt. Its composition is not fixed but remains open for others to join.
If you want to be part of the Awareness Working Group, reach out via: awareness@holzmarkt.com
5. How is awareness trained?
Many members of the group are already trained in awareness basics as well as advanced topics like anti-discrimination work. Over the past months, all participants completed the awareness basic training and introductory sessions in anti-racism, dealing with ableism, working with survivors of sexualized violence, and power and knowledge hierarchies.
6. How can the awareness group be reached?
General email address: awareness@holzmarkt.com
The group can currently be reached through the above email address. An anonymous online tool is also available, where you can contact the group and choose two trusted members.
You are free to choose which member of the Awareness Working Group you contact, including someone from another work area. All messages are treated with strict confidentiality.
7. What hierarchies exist?
The group seeks to create a space independent of job-position hierarchies. It includes members of the leadership team as well as people who only recently joined Holzmarkt.
8. Which processes do we offer?
The Awareness Working Group offers conversations, mediations, and referrals to external support services (e.g. counseling for survivors of sexualized violence, addiction counseling, or organizations working with perpetrators). The group supports problem-solving for internal team issues, cases of overload, and initiates transformative processes.
9. How do we continue to develop?
There is an awareness that both the group and awareness work itself are in constant development. Ideas and input are welcome, and the group looks forward to continuing this newly begun process.