Europe is experiencing one of the most significant influxes of migrants in its history. Pushed by civil war and terror and pulled by the promise of a better life, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa, risking their lives along the way. The scale of the crisis has put huge pressures on some destination countries. Focusing just on applications from citizens of non-member countries , there was a gradual increase in the number of asylum applications within the EU-27 and later the EU-28 through to 2012, after which the number of asylum seekers rose to 431 thousand in 2013, 627 thousand in 2014 and close to 1.3 million in 2015. The 2015 number of asylum applications within the EU-28 was almost double the number recorded within the EU-15 in 1992, when there was a peack due to the Jugoslavian crises. The organisations involved in the project are in frontline in the work with migrants and asylum seekers and feel strongly the need to improve the quality of the services offered and - if necessary - to review their strategy. For this reason, MINE wants to be a fist step towards a new paradigma. The main idea is to create the setting in which different organisations and institutions with different expertise in the areas of hot spots, house policy, job integration, language teaching, awareness of the local communities can join together and share it. MINE is a 18 months strategic partnership for the exchange of good practices that involves 9 organisations from Italy, Portugal, Greece, Macedonia, UK, Germany, Finland, Lithuania and Turkey. It included a mix of local activities and learning mobilities. The objectives are:- to characterize what constitutes a good practices- to identify one good practice in each organisation, focusing on each field of expertise- to provide a virtual and face-to-face space to share and learning from each others- to improve the competences of the educators involved in the areas of house policy, job integration, language teaching, awareness of the local communities - to extend the educators competences of using the ICT for learning- to support the organisation involved in starting a reviewing process of what they offer and how to their target group, by importing elements of good practices acquired during the learning mobilities- to learn how to import some elements of the good practices in each institutions' work- to create a network of organisations that can work together in other projects on this topic (such as Daphne, KA2-development of innovation)The methodology we are going to use is based on the following pillars:- a proper balance of local work and transnational meetings. Even if it is a project of exchange of good practices, MINE does not include only face to face or virtual exchanges. - experiential learning. Basing on Kolb's learning cycle, we will propose a concrete experience (the doing) and we will support a reflective observation and a conceptualisation of the experience in order to deduct the learning (learning by doing). So, most of our activities will be dynamic, interactive and will allow participants to put in action situations, problems, ideas and so on (role-play, simulation, organisational constellation, theatre, psichodramma)- peer learning. The sense in which we use it here suggests a two-way, reciprocal learning activity. Peer learning should be mutually beneficial and involve the sharing of knowledge, ideas and experience between the participants. The educators will learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to others and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers. They develop skills in organizing and planning learning activities, working collaboratively with others, giving and receiving feedback and evaluating their own learning.
Europe is experiencing one of the most significant influxes of migrants in its history. Pushed by civil war and terror and pulled by the promise of a better life, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa, risking their lives along the way. The organisations involved in the project are in frontline in the work with migrants and asylum seekers and feel strongly the need to improve the quality of the services offered and - if necessary - to review their strategy. The main objectives was: to characterize what constitutes a good practices; to identify one good practice in each organisation, focusing on each field of expertise; to provide a virtual and face-to-face space to share and learning from each others; to improve the competences of the educators involved in the areas of house policy, job integration, language teaching, awareness of the local communities; to extend the educators competences of using the ICT for learning; to support the organisation involved in starting a reviewing process of what they offer and how to their target group, by importing elements of good practices acquired during the learning mobilities; to learn how to import some elements of the good practices in each institutions' work; to create a network of organisations that can work together. The organisations involved in the project was totally nine: mainly "non-governmental organization/association/social enterprise" but also "Non-profit making cultural organizations and "Local Public Body. The main activities was local and trasnational. Each local reality has been involved in carrying out three types of activities. 1) Identification of what a good practice is: a working group in each country defines the characteristics of good practices, using some literatures researches and their own experience. The coordinator of each working group has then shared it and created a common document. This has been the base to identify what practices to share with the others partners during the learning mobilities. 2) Report of the legal procedure that a migrant need to take once arrived in each country the report will focus on steps, timing and consequences. 3) Working on implementing elements of good practices in each reality. After the learning activities, there has been a working group to share what elements of good practices each organizations could import and implement. The staff was involved in three training events in three different locations.The exchange of experiences and practices between organisations was an unforgettable experience that will benefit all for a long time. Meeting and seeing practical examples of life as a refugee left a great impression on the participants. The activities was organised using non-formal education methods, and was focused mostly on sharing and exchanging practices. The participants as well got the chance to better understand the different realities, to visit different stakeholders which influenced their further engagement, but also understandings and vision on how to plan local and national activities concerning the refugees and migrants. The organizations increased their capacity to perform new activities, established networks throughout the city and partnerships with the relevant stakeholders. More specifically, the main impacts of the project towards the organisation were the practices that were shared and explored within the duration of the project. The partners will maintain this results by developing it in their everyday activities. About the longer-term benefits, all the participants will continue to use the practices that were shared throughout the project in our further work after the end of the project. Something which is positive is that the practices are clear, but also they can be transferable and flexible which is very useful for us. An additional thing that will be maintained after the end of the EU funding would be the networking and partnerships, as many of the partners have huge expertise on certain topics, for which we could still consult and share, and also continue to share and comment on different good practices which we see beneficial for the consortium of the project. The successful partnership that we established in this project yielded very fruitful results and hopefully, we will work for similar future activities as well. We think that will be different sources of support: first of all, the partner organisations have everyday activity with the refugee an so they can continue on the implementation of the project results just adding this methodology on their activity without special financial issue (most of the things do not specifically require a huge support, as the contacts and links are already established.), secondly we are talking about the possibility to further apply for funding within the Erasmus+ program, or some other programs and going on the experimentation and the common work.