To help migrants integrate across the EU, the group must not be limited to the vulnerable role of mere supplicants who file their requests at public offices. Instead, when they enter into contact with the local civil society groups, the immigrants start feeling empowered as individuals and as a group and will therefore speak out more freely about their needs and concerns. The project aims at collecting and multiplying good practices to enhance the know-how of voluntary NGO workers active at the grass-roots level of a given municipality or district. By focusing on local NGOs, the project will allow an exchange of good practices, for example on the ways to provide non-formal education to adult migrants. Slowly but surely, we make progress as we attempt to reach out to vulnerable communities at risk of social exclusion. In the case of each partner organisation we forge new bonds with groups and individuals, winning their trust and encouraging them to participate in our activities in the capacity of our consultants who can offer their invaluable and unique expertise on specific problems of specific groups at a high risk of exclusion. Some of them are nationals of the nearby Ukraine while others originate from Africa, India or Israel. While we offer our consultants an insight into our districts and municipalities, we also draw inspiration from them. Our voluntary workers obtain unique in-depth knowledge about other people and about cultural differences and they obtain it from person-to-person contacts rather than the mass media. We wish to share this knowledge and experience with others for mutual benefit and with a hope to lay the groundwork for more acceptance of immigrants in our societies, acceptance that is founded on profound and direct individual contacts with those newly arrived. This exchange is mutually enriching, especially as we learn to be guides to our home country.
Our intention was to acquire the necessary knowledge to make a responsible attempt at rapprochement with migrants who, apart from systemic help, need individual support and a dignified, human start. We counted on the effect of empowerment of individuals who were to be treated in an individual and friendly manner, which would facilitate their integration and support building a positive image in the host society. Their integration would be testified to by those who got to know them, showed them around the symbolic house, entered into a deeper relationship. We, as organizations, were also supposed to benefit from this specific cultural exchange, build the potential and competences of our members. In order to achieve this effect, it was necessary to find and, if possible, implement such good practices that strengthen the knowledge of members and volunteers of organizations undertaking activities for the benefit of migrants on a micro scale (local, district, housing estate). An additional element important for us was to strengthen the competences of volunteers in building the potential of volunteering as well as in the field of language competences.
After research carried out in each of the project's partner countries, we decided that it is necessary to support migrants as individuals, help in their self-organization throughout the European Union. In this way, integration would take place not only through their contacts with institutions, where they are the weaker party as applicants and exposed to possible discriminatory practices, but also through contacts with representatives of self-organized groups of citizens. Such an effect was to facilitate the empowerment of individuals and groups of foreigners in Europe, easier for migrants to express their opinion about their situation and problems. Finally, the reason for our activities was to find such good practices that strengthen the knowledge of members and volunteers of organizations that undertake activities for the benefit of migrants also on a micro scale (local, district, housing estate).