Family Minister Josefine Paul congratulates the municipalities: "I warmly congratulate the six winning municipalities. My thanks go to all the participating cities and municipalities that presented convincing concepts. This shows how important it is for our municipalities to launch new ideas and concepts for family friendliness and to focus on the diversity of families."
Under this motto, North Rhine-Westphalian municipalities were able to take part in the competition for the "Family Municipality" state award from the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Family Affairs for the first time in 2024. Six municipalities particularly impressed a jury of scientists and politicians with their family-friendly diversity and were honored as "Family Municipality 2024". Brief portraits of the award-winning municipalities offer an initial insight into their family-friendly concepts and innovative individual projects and can serve as inspiration.
North Rhine-Westphalia is a family-friendly state, and the local authorities make a decisive contribution to this. Whether a large city, medium-sized town, small town or rural municipality - family-friendliness can be experienced directly where you live.
A total of 34 municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia applied for the state prize, some of them with elaborately designed applications. The district of Düren and the city of Hamm (in the large city category), the cities of Brühl and Gladbeck (in the medium-sized city category) as well as the small town of Windeck and the rural municipality of Dörentrup can look forward to receiving the award as a particularly diverse "Family Municipality 2024". Among other things, they impressed with family-friendly transport projects, an intergenerational and open village community and the promotion of the influx of families.
The winning municipalities will receive the award, which comes with prize money of 10,000 euros each, at a festive awards ceremony on December 12, 2024.
Family-friendly living can look very different. The following pages present the six award-winning municipalities and provide an insight into the diversity of their offerings.
A jury consisting of members from science and politics decided on the awarding of the state prize. This consisted of:
The "Family Municipality" state prize is intended to make the commitment of municipalities to family friendliness more visible. This can show perspectives for municipalities with a comparable starting position, so that good practice examples can spread beyond municipalities.
All municipalities with existing family-friendly concepts or innovative individual projects that are integrated into the municipal mission statement and fit in with the motto "We live diversity" were eligible to apply. In order to enable smaller and medium-sized municipalities to participate in the state prize, the administrative effort for the application was deliberately kept to a minimum.
The plan is for the state prize to be announced every two years in future, focusing on a different thematic focus in the context of family friendliness each time.
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