1.Improve staff skills.i) Educators understand, in a comparative perspective, how the host institution carries out its interventions about consumption dynamics and about emerging conflicts in public spaces; ii) educators improve their knowledge about RDD and RDR practices including "safe consumption" practices and understand the role of the cultural mediator in the field of outreach work. 2.Update Papa Giovanni’s methodologies in outreach work: practices for engaging with users, for distributing of information and health material (and type of material); strategies for reporting and accompanying users to public welfare services; practices for intervening in problematic urban areas; for activating groups of "peers"; for mediating medical and health procedures addressed to migrants. 3.Enlarge Papa Giovanni’s network to an European level:i) Identification of best practices for the protection of users' well-being and to develop social mediation interventions.ii) Capacity to share information about new styles of consumption and psychoactive substances and about transnational phenomena at European level.iii) Increase the organization's ability to interpret and manage local contexts from the perspective of transnational phenomena.
The sending organisation “Centro Sociale Papa Giovanni XXIII S.C.S. Onlus” (from now on “Papa Giovanni”) has been involved in outreach work since 2001. Since the early years it has developed numerous projects building a network with other subjects, especially at regional and national level. The Project aimed to strengthen this network, adding an European opening that would allow Papa Giovanni to improve the professional skills of its staff. In particular, the Project responded to the following needs: 1)Substance use is a phenomenon that cannot be tackled only at the local level, but a transnational perspective is needed to learn about new psychoactive substances and changes in consumption styles as well as about the theories and methodologies of harm and risk reduction. 2) The users are largely migrants, including many asylum seekers who have left the right to stay in the hosting facilities. They are people who move beyond national borders and who call into question a transnational action. 3)Social, cultural and conflict mediation projects have a strong territorial roots, but international openness can bring important insights into different and innovative projects developed in other contexts.