The ever-increasing phenomenon of human migrations is posing new challenges to host societies all around Europe – in 2016, «2 million non-EU citizens immigrated to the EU and EU Member States granted citizenship to almost 1 million persons» (Eurostat, 2018). Whether this flow will be considered a threat or an enriching opportunity also depends on the ability of EU countries to facilitate and coordinate smooth integration processes. The majority of migrants generally need to develop a new set of skills in order to enhance their life-project in the hosting country. In most cases, providing training courses to migrants, by teaching local languages and offering vocational training. Nonetheless, migrants often struggle to capitalize the benefits of the educational and training paths they are involved in. In our opinion, the main causes for this lack of commitment are the condition of trauma that often affects them and their difficulty in understanding the new socio-cultural setting. In order to develop successful integration processes, it is necessary to implement effective educational and training methodologies, through innovative ways of increasing learners’ motivation. This is the main reason why we would like to implement a mentoring model aimed at giving advice and orientation to migrants, so as to increase their motivation and other civic competences. Evidence shows that most mentoring programmes are successful in the development of soft skills, such as self-esteem, resilience, self-efficacy, whilst promotes the achievement of hard outcomes (eg, education, employability) (Colley, 2003), and mentoring can have a potential benefit when the outcomes are well set and adaptable to the migrant condition (Månsson and Delander, 2017). Mentors, in this conception, must be experienced persons willing to pass on their knowledge in order to help the mentees to find in themselves the necessary resources to reach their own goals. Several mentoring programmes for migrants across Europe aim at employment, language and cultural assimilation and, plenty of projects are being developed in the framework of mentoring and migrants. All the organizations supporting the integration of migrants need to rethink the role of mentoring to impact not only knowledge and skills but, more importantly, social inclusion. Investment on training mentors providing them with practical tools, alongside with accompaniment, monitoring and measurement instruments are key factors to widen the success stories of migrants. The RISING project wants to integrate the motivational benefits of mentoring into the training and educational curriculum offered to migrants. Specifically, RISING will seek to provide a set of tools, complimentary to those projects already being carried out, in order to help mentors fulfilling their roles and to provide additional support for mentoring providers. RISING partners will work to create: IO1 - Handbook of tools and resources for mentors, including success stories of migrants; IO2 - Interactive tools for mentees’ uptake; IO3 - Toolkit for mentoring impact. During project duration, RISING wants to target: -30 individuals to be trained as mentors -30 migrants to be involved as mentees -35 participants in transnational learning mobilities -155 stakeholders at multiplier events At project completion, RISING partners intend to achieve: -Raised awareness on the importance of motivation for migrants to adhere to further education; -Increased number of mentees interested in entering mentoring programs; -Improved skills on mentors for migrants, especially on pushing migrants to action; -Better prepared mentors by putting at their disposal a handbook of resources for mentoring sessions; -Increased levels of motivation and proactivity among migrant mentees; -Improved relationships between mentors and mentees, by better understanding of what is expected from both roles; -Better equipped mentoring providers and practitioners, able to provide robust data and evidence-based mentoring, making use of the toolkit for process management; -Improved skills among partners’ staff and volunteers,enabling them to provide alternative support to migrants and/ or their mentors.
The RISING project was an opportunity to develop a set of contents, materials and resources to improve mentoring processes as a strategy to promote the social inclusion of migrant and/or more disadvantaged people, integrating the motivational benefits of mentoring in the training opportunities available for migrants. In fact, the mentoring was being implemented, in the last years, as a model for the inclusion of migrants and refugees in the hosting countries. And these questions were addressed by the development of the intellectual outputs of RISING. In our perspective, develop and implement was an opportunity: to develop new and more resources for mentoring sessions; to provide mentors with a set of resources they can use within their mentees; to empower organizations with contents, strategies, tools and resources to disseminate and implement mentoring processes; to contribute to a greater awareness on the goals, purpose and achievements of mentoring as a strategy to motivate migrants and refugees for the social inclusion process in the host communities; to emphasize the role of the mentoring and its motivational benefits in the training opportunities for migrants and/or refugees; to contribute to a more inclusive society.
The ever-increasing phenomenon of human migrations is posing new challenges to host societies all around Europe. Whether this flow will be considered a threat or an enriching opportunity also depends on the ability of EU countries to facilitate and coordinate smooth integration processes. The majority of migrants generally need to develop a new set of skills in order to enhance their life project in the hosting country. Nonetheless, migrants often struggle to capitalize the benefits of the educational and training paths they are involved in. Motivation is the driving force that allows us to reach everything from getting up in the morning to starting to learn a new language. Thus everyone is centrally concerned with motivation, in moving themselves or others to act. We identified a gap in existing mentoring aids and programmes, namely that the motivational aspects of the process, very important in the long term, were not strongly developed compared to hard skills, and also found evidence stating the need to address this subject. This project set out to implement a modern and inclusive mentoring model aimed at giving advice and orientation specifically to migrants, so as to increase their motivation and other civic competences.