The VI International Coordination Meeting of the project “NEAR – NEwly ARrived in a common home” took place on January 30 and 31, at the Education HUB, at the headquarters of the partner CARDET in Nicosia, Cyprus.
CARDET organized and hosted the event, with the promoter of the project, the ISMU Foundation (Italy), and the other partners of the consortium – TAMAT (Italy), AIDGLOBAL (Portugal) and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), in order to take stock of the progress of the project and plan the last and next steps to be taken, highlighting the final event that will take place in Brussels, on February 7 and 8, 2023.
This meeting was also attended by invited speakers, namely teacher Eleftheria Kallis. She gave her testimony regarding her voluntary experience with children and young people with and for whom she worked, within the scope of the project, in Nicosia.
The Centre for Social Cohesion, Development and Care (CODECA) and the Pedagogical Institute of Cyprus (CPI) presented their work to integrate newly arrived migrants, including students, into Cyprus.
“Home is where I am right now!” this motto started the presentation of the results of the communication campaign, promoted in the context of the Project, by Fondazione ISMU, which proved to be very positive. The focus was on the last two activities carried out: the “Treasure Hunt” and the Final Documentary that summarizes and contextualizes the work implemented in four European cities — Lisbon, Nicosia, Perugia and Milan — made of images and interviews with each partner and that is guided for two years to promote intercultural sharing and structural relations between migrants and local communities.
See the documentary below.
The ISMU Foundation, through a timeline, shared all the learning resulting from the training to community agents, which each partner entity developed in its city. The methodologies adopted to involve community agents, institutions and diaspora associations were analyzed. It was also highlighted the importance of co-creation and the design of “Unconventional Maps”, that is, maps prepared, in a participatory way, by the community.
It is worth highlighting the impact that training has had on community actors, as it allows them today to have a more sustained and informed orientation to support newly arrived migrants in their communities and contribute to minimising local needs.
The identification of the area of intervention of each city was essential for the creation of urban agriculture laboratories, aimed at refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the identification of schools, educational centers and associations that work for and with minors. In the case of Portugal, the selected territory was the Parish of Santa Clara, in Lisbon.
This type of approach allowed the mapping of the services (social, educational, security,…) available in the areas of intervention, essential for the integration of any migrant upon arrival in a new city, which led to the design of the “Conventional Maps”.
In the activities of training refugees and community agents, one point to be highlighted was the approach used, which means, the "learn by doing", in order to allow the beneficiaries, at all levels, to get involved and learn through experiences they were having in their daily lives.
The TAMAT partner presented the results of training courses aimed at refugees and asylum seekers on entrepreneurship, urban agriculture, inclusion, health care and culture.
Each partner in their cities has identified organisations working with asylum seekers and refugees to involve them in the recruitment process and plan their training based on their needs. Twenty interviews were conducted, per partner, in which language skills and previous work experiences were evaluated.
From formal and non-formal learning, the activity of guiding the beneficiaries included improving the knowledge of social assistance institutions and services that allowed to strengthen the freedom of choice of migrants, foster their autonomy and promote social inclusion.
The workshops developed around the urban agriculture laboratories required the identification of an isolated space in the cities to be transformed into a place for the creation of community gardens. This process involved the community and diaspora associations that played a crucial role in the outreach work and motivation of all participants.
AIDGLOBAL presented the results obtained in the activities with newly arrived migrant children, developed by the project partners. The Organization began by making a brief contextualization on the importance of improving the access of newly arrived school-age minors to the host society, in order to reinforce their sense of belonging to the new context and the new community, acting through the dynamization of extracurricular workshops that focused on mutual understanding and cultural exchange.
Ensuring the safeguarding of the perspectives of integration, equal opportunities and the right to citizenship is one of the fundamental roles of the school.
Several activities were developed with children, from presenting their countries of origin to discovering new places, through urban walks, during which they had the opportunity to discover symbolic places of the host city and the recreational services available. The community was involved in the development of actions aimed at disseminating environmental education practices and sustainable management of the neighborhood where they reside.
It was noted that the total number of newly arrived minors benefiting from the activities developed in each partner country was 909 children, distributed in 9 different schools. As for the workshops, 46 were put into practice, exceeding what was planned – 20.
Finally, the Universitá Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore shared the learning related to the work developed with university students.
It was underlined that projects such as “NEAR”, are very important to facilitate the lives of students who have just arrived, from other countries, and who need due support for better integration in the spaces that welcome them.
In general, the results of the partners' work, with regard to universities, proved to be positive, despite the lack of flexibility in the procedures and bureaucratic constraints existing in the Universities with which the partner Organizations were confronted, which made it difficult to disseminate the maps created with the beneficiaries of the project.
Despite this, strategies were created, outside and within the university space, to be able to reach the newly arrived students with the maps co-created to help them integrate into this new place that is now theirs.
Cardet, at the end of the meeting on this first day, challenged the NEAR team to a joint brainstorming, in order to keep the project “alive”. The aim was to ensure its sustainability, after two years working for the integration of newly arrived migrants. Who could get involved and help started the rain of ideas among the partners that resulted in the following conclusions: mentioning “NEAR” when working on other similar projects that could lead to exchanges of ideas with other stakeholders, keeping in touch with the students involved in the project to disseminate to the world the maps designed and continue to share them, at each beginning of the school year, incorporate the maps on each Organization Website, keep the digital communication channels open and offer the materials to local authorities.
The event ended with a visit to the shelter managed by CODECA, in partnership with CARDET, where 14 young people from Somalia reside and where the community garden is created.
“NEAR – NEwly ARrived in a common home” is a European project funded by the European Commission, under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), with the ISMU Foundation as the promoter and Tamat, CARDET, AIDGLOBAL and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuoreas partner entities. In Portugal, this project is being developed in the Lisbon Zone.
