Bremen Adult Education Center (vhs)

The premier address for further education in Bremen

With 1,067 employees and lecturers from 58 countries, we are your largest provider of further education in Bremen – and with over 100 years of experience, probably also one of the oldest.

At 8 locations and over 170 learning sites in Bremen, we are committed to ensuring that you can learn up-to-date content in a modern environment.

Curiosity drives
us. You can find us in the city's neighborhoods as well as in the city center. As a municipal education provider, we have a mission to compensate for unequal opportunities, open up new perspectives, and enable peaceful coexistence for all Bremen residents. What motivates us are the people of our city and their curiosity about the many still unknown facets of life.

Learning together with them and passing on acquired knowledge brings us joy. Because, echoing Paul Mommetz, we are convinced: "Whoever throws a stone into the water also changes the sea." And who, if not the people of Bremen, knows how even the slightest changes can cause water to find new paths and create something new?.

Independence is important to us.
As a municipal enterprise, we offer the people of Bremen a high-quality, comprehensive, and customer-oriented educational program for all segments of the population, based on the Bremen Continuing Education Act. Our interdisciplinary teams throughout Bremen contribute to safeguarding the right to education guaranteed to all citizens in the state constitution.

Our municipal mandate makes us independent and obligates us solely to the common good. We see ourselves as a center for further education, communication, and community engagement for all people in the city. Our standards are quality and professionalism, affordability, and accessibility of continuing education.

Each year we record more than 56,000 participants in approximately 5,000 events from the program areas of foreign languages, politics and society, culture, health, basic education and German as a foreign language.

We have the people of Bremen in mind.
With various learning arrangements such as courses, educational periods, weekend events, training courses, excursions or lectures, we promote dialogue and understanding between generations, genders and people from different cultural backgrounds.

The program therefore also includes tailor-made offers for special groups, for example for young people, for older people, for immigrants, for the unemployed or for people with reading and spelling difficulties.

In developing current programs and using new teaching methods, our program developers focus on the life phases and circumstances of the people in our city, as well as on the topics and social developments of our time – be it the influences of digitalization, which is entering almost all areas of life, the question of the resilience and safeguarding of our robust democracy, or the implementation of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

A network for Bremen.
We are proud of each and every one of our more than 181 partnerships. Through them, we are deeply networked within Bremen, reaching into the local neighborhoods, and can also make our voices heard nationally and across Europe. Working with partners makes it possible, for example, to implement intercultural projects together on a broad scale, to advance social issues such as integration, and to expand our inclusive teaching concepts for people with disabilities.

On behalf of the municipality, the Bremen Adult Education Center (vhs) is active in the German Adult Education Association (DVV), which has over 900 member adult education centers in Germany. Furthermore, through its management, it is represented on the board of trustees of the DVV International, which supports the development and expansion of sustainable structures for youth and adult education in over 50 countries.

At the federal level, we work closely with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, the Federal Employment Agency, numerous state and federal authorities, and the European Social Fund (ESF). This allows us to offer Bremen residents a wide range of integration courses, vocational German language support, initial orientation courses for refugees (ELMA), and basic education courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as to operate the Bremen State Literacy Center.

Our home:
Since 2007, all our activities have been centered in the historically significant Bamberger House at Faulenstraße 69. It has become one of the central hubs for adult learning and community engagement in our city. Visitors can enjoy a magnificent view of Bremen from the rooftop garden on the 9th floor.

A permanent exhibition in the front stairwell provides information about the Jewish merchant and former owner of the house, Julius Bamberger. Starting in summer 2020, we will create a vibrant "memorial" on the ground floor – a place for free thought, encounters, and exchange to promote democracy and social cohesion in Bremen and the surrounding region.