Families feel comfortable in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region because they sense that they are welcome and that efforts are made to look after their interests. Young families in particular desire above all an adequate and flexible degree of child care opportunities in their immediate surroundings. Their quality of life is decisively characterised by the ease with which work and the family can be reconciled.
In the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, family friendliness has been regarded as one of the most important location and growth factors for years. A wide range of initiatives have been instigated and solution approaches developed at social, economic and political level. The key topic of family friendliness is right at the top of the agenda of corporate human resource policies and municipal family policy.
The "Compatibility of Work and Family" forum, a project organised under the umbrella of Rhein-Neckar Metropolregion GmbH, contributes to the regional coordination of these wide-ranging activities. Its members (to date around 360 representatives from business, science and politics) have been jointly engaging in realising sustainable concepts for improving the compatibility of work and family in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region since as long ago as 1999. This cross-institution commitment has been collaborating closely with the "Local Alliances for the Family" initiative set up by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs since 2005.
The objective of the "Compatibility of Work and Family" forum is to create family-friendly basic conditions for the working world and to make the metropolitan region even more attractive for families. The forum sensitises companies and local authorities to the interests of families, informs companies and parents about all issues relating to compatibility, and networks protagonists from the worlds of politics, business and society. The forum's ongoing, municipal boundary-transcending network activities form the basis for enabling the MRN to establish itself as a family-friendly living and working environment.
