“Meet me halfway: diverse couples - the art of thinking independently together” is a project addressed to culturally and ethnically diverse couples and marriages across Europe. The plan of the project has been founded on a past analytic investigation of the key difficulties of the culturally mixed pairs in Europe. The program is designed to enrich and develop skills and cross cultural capability of participants. It will be mixed couples and cross cultural societies, including low skilled and low qualified people, threatened with social exclusion and facing other type of difficulties or challenges in every day social or family life concerning their background. The project will also develop all entities staff members in context of working with diverse communities and supporting people threatened with exclusion. Project is invented by Polish Atalaya Foundation and is implemented in a partnership with organizations from Spain and Italy. As the result of the project, there will be an output in a form of a international intercultural Guide for mixed couples named "Meet me halway: diverse couples - the art of thinking independently together". It would be a transnational work of three partnership organizations, collecting the methods, experience and a knowledge in a field of supporting and empowering people / families with different cultural background. Our aim is to cooperate on transnational bases to exchange local knowledge, good practices and experiences in the topic and bring it into common European wealth. Each partner is an expert in certain scientific and psychological methodology (Cross cultural competence, NVC Mediations, Gestalt Counceling, Dragon Dreaming and Emotional Management), what would make the final results unique in a scale of EU. The main idea is to explore, exchange and built a new added quality practices and guidelines for mixed couples, based on differentiation of up to date methodologies and soft skills development tools. The background of the project is a growing tendency of culturally mixed couple and marriages. Experiences of our partners also confirms the growth of these numbers and tendency of changes in European level (foreign forecasts in France and GB we faced during researches on the topic). Project aims to develop the common language beyond boundaries and to build good mixed couples practices to be used and shared among people who are already facing cultural differences or want to step into such patterned relationship. Going further in this line of thinking, it’s important for us to take under consideration possibility of mixed couple marriages (present or future) and parenthood. Our beneficiaries are also families as social units and also third or double culture children themselves. In the project we come across the cross-cultural understanding and focus on interpersonal relations in multicultural context between partners with different cultural backgrounds. The project would engage and support lows skilled and qualified representatives in context of marginalization and higher exclusion risk. Promotion of self development tools (interpersonal, communication, conflict solving, self confidence) in helping adults in dealing with cross cultural issues is a crucial point of the project. Additional goals of the project are to increase quality of entities work by gaining knowledge and experience about new methods and within international, also cross cultural collaboration (Polish, Spanish, Italian, but also having Serbian and Albanian members on the board). We would like to strengthen international bonds and incorporate cultural dimension to our every day work. Main activities in the project: - deeper research and needs analysis via interviewing target audiences - workshops and group meetings / individual consultances for participants to engage them in Guide preparation and also test the provided tools - get their feedback - Three 5-day trainings, each for 7 participants, in purpose to share, practice and gain knowledge and new competences in specific methods contributed by each partner and supportive in working within cross cultural environment or excluded entities - research, testing, writing, translating and editing final result - Meet Me Halfway Guide to make it as practical as possible Expected impact: - self development of the mix pairs participants - influence on their family members and members of their societies - growth of the diversity and inclusion awareness among cross cultural pairs society, government and non government institutions and organizations, public opinion (in context of cross cultural pairs, marriages, parenthood, but also inclusion of the minorities or low skilled entities) - inspiration of the European organizations and institutions by providing project descriptions and dissemination activities and sharing the Guide as a 'ready to use' tool in projecting and implementing similar or new activities dedicated to culturally diverse environment.
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