Refugees Welcome Porto is an Informal Youth Group, which promotes a project which has as its main mission contributing to the creation of a "welcoming culture". Our focus is on supporting refugees in their life in a country other than their own, seeking to mitigate, where possible, the difficulties of adapting to a different reality. Portugal has received, since, 2015, more than 1500 people – mainly relocated from Greece and Italy. Nevertheless, more than half have now left the country. The motivations for moving away are several, but some of the causes are related to the lack of support and information about the services at their disposal here. In the other hand, there are several initiatives to help refugees but the lack of communication and articulation between them and the refugees means they often are discontinued. We want to create a bridge that helps people have easy access to up-to-date and reliable information that can really help them in their daily needs. We intend to provide this service online, through a website and an online chat; and offline through small offices where people can go and get one to one help.
Refugees Welcome Porto, an informal group of young people, promotes a project whose main mission is to contribute to the creation of a "welcoming culture". Our focus is to support refugees in their lives, in the integration in a country that is not theirs, seeking to mitigate, when possible, the difficulties of adapting to a different reality. Since 2015, Portugal has received more than 1500 refugee people - mainly transferred from Greece and Italy. However, more than half have left the country. The motivations for them to abandon the country are several, but the causes are often related to the lack of support and information about the services available to them, generating serious gaps in the process of welcoming these people. Despite this lack of services that reach migrants and refugees, we know that there are several initiatives to help refugees - initiatives that could fill many of the gaps that affect this population. However, the lack of communication and articulation between both parties means that often one is not aware of the other. It is this mismatch that we intend to eliminate with this project. We want to create a bridge that helps people to have easy access to updated and reliable information that can really help them in their daily needs. We intend to provide this service online, through a website and an online chat; and offline through small offices where people can go and get individual help.