Opening of the “TUMO Centre Essen | Ruhr Area” after the North Rhine-Westphalia summer holidays
Good news for greater educational equality in the Ruhr area: the RAG-Stiftung, Essen/Germany, the project sponsor Accenture and KfW are jointly enabling the establishment of a new TUMO learning centre.
TUMO is an innovative, free educational concept for young people between the ages of twelve and 18 that was developed in Armenia and introduced in Germany on the initiative of KfW. It is primarily aimed at disadvantaged young people and teaches them important STEM and digital skills. The new “TUMO Learning Centre Essen | Ruhr Area” will start operating after the summer holidays (Figure 1). It will be located in renovated premises in the Colosseum in Essen city centre, which have been specially adapted to the centre’s needs.
More than 700 young people per week will be able to develop their skills in eight subject areas at the TUMO centre in Essen after school. Thanks to an individually developed learning path, participants first acquire basic digital skills, which are then deepened and consolidated twice a week in a workshop of their choice with twelve to 16 young people and their own learning laboratories. The “curriculum” includes workshops on animation, programming, 3D modelling and robotics, as well as graphic design and photography, which are offered several times a week. The young people determine their own pace of learning.
The centre is financially supported by the RAG-Stiftung, which, as the largest educational sponsor in the Ruhr region, has already initiated and implemented numerous projects that support disadvantaged children and young people in particular in their educational careers.
“Educational opportunities should not depend on a child’s background or their parents’ wallet. With its educational support, the RAG-Stiftung aims to contribute to greater educational equality in the former mining regions. The TUMO Learning Centre Essen | Ruhrgebiet will also contribute to this goal in the future by offering young people the opportunity to acquire STEM and digital skills – voluntarily after school and, above all, completely free of charge. For these reasons, we are strongly committed to supporting the establishment of the TUMO Learning Centre in Essen and have campaigned for it to be located in the Ruhr region,” says Bärbel Bergerhoff-Wodopia, member of the RAG-Stiftung’s Executive Board.
Accenture will operate the learning centre in Essen as the project sponsor. This includes, among other things, the educational management of the centre and the recruitment and training of coaches (learning support for young people) and workshop leaders.
Christina Raab, Chairwoman of the Management Board of Accenture in Germany, emphasises: “Digital, creative technologies are becoming increasingly important in our working world. Accenture has therefore been supporting initiatives that teach young people and professionals precisely these skills for many years. TUMO Essen | Ruhrgebiet offers a great extracurricular training programme to prepare today’s young people for the professional demands of tomorrow. We are proud to be able to realise this project with the RAG-Stiftung.”
The TUMO Learning Centre Essen | Ruhrgebiet is the fifth TUMO centre for extracurricular education in Germany, following centres in Berlin, Mannheim, Hirschaid and Lüdenscheid.
The first TUMO centre is still located in a park named after the Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanyan. Colloquially, the park is also called TUMO, from which the name TUMO Centre is derived. TUMO’s goal is to empower young people to deal with the challenges and opportunities of digitalisation in society and the world of work.
Further information on TUMO Essen | Ruhrgebiet, including details on registration, is available here: https://essen.tumo.de (RAG-Stiftung/Si.)
