No child left behind is a project initiated by the Noi Re-Cream Association based in Timisoara, Romania and realised in partnership with organization from five different European countries: Promipresa (Italy), Synthesis (Cyprus), KMOP (Greece), Inercia Digital (Spain) and Previform (Portugal). The project aims at refining the communication within transnational families, by educating migrant parents and parental educators and offering tools to facilitate a continuous and substantial communication with the children left behind at home. The project responds to the critical situation of children left behind by parents migrating for work, feeling abandoned and without support in their most important years of development, when emotional security plays a very important role. The project will be developed for a period of 24 months, across all the countries where the partners carry out their activities, and will focus on creating, implementing and disseminating three intellectual outputs: a training course of 15 modules of adult education training methods, an online platform with information and activities for parents and children and a digital application - KEEP IN TOUCH - connecting parents and children through a gamified component: daily activities and a system based on challenges, badges, and rewards. The target groups of our project cover a large diversity of people and entities involved in managing the situations resulting from separating families due to work migration: parents, parental educators, organizations and institutions dealing with migration issues. The innovative character of the projects lies in the fact that we address the problems of transnational families by improving the understanding of the parents and their needs and offering direct tools for families to improve their connection and communication. For best results, we target not only parents themselves, but adult educators who can help implement and disseminate the project’s results across a large number of families, also outside of the project course. We offer a specific focus on an intense communication strategy firstly at an internal level, building a tight collaboration between the partners and setting diverse and open channels of communication for the work teams. Secondly, the project has a strong and rich dissemination strategy meant to promote the project’s results as efficiently as possible. The multiplier events are very important milestones in the dissemination of the project and they are thought of as developing and strengthening the communities of parental educators and migrant parents, enhancing the exchange of information, practices and products. The anticipated impact of the project is essential in the development of the life quality and family integrity in European countries. As a result of the project’s activities and products, the migrant parents who benefit out of it will be able to identify their individual needs concerning their relationship with their children and find a proper way to respond to them through the use of the project’s technological tools (the platform and the app). In the same time, the impact of the capacity building at the level of parental education will ripple the benefits of the project beyond its direct participants and far beyond its duration period. The professional organizations involved - within the consortium or through associate partnership - will align their practices at the best service for families to find a balanced and harmonious relation and raise their children properly, with understanding, attention and care.
Given the content of the project and the target groups (migrant parents, parental educators, left behind children ), the project had focused on the needs of these categories. The general objective of the project was to establish a solid link between parental education and personal abilities of migrant parents to ensure children “left behind” can reach their full potential. Specific objectives: To develop competences for 24 parental educators from 6 countries in order to adapt their activities to the needs of migrant parents, over the course of 24 months To develop abilities of 96 migrant parents to develop and preserve a healthy relationship with their left behind children, through interventions of 24 parental educators and through the use of an online platform and online and mobile app, over the course of 24 months To raise awareness regarding the relevance of parental education for migrant parents in national educational strategies of the 6 countries participating in the project and at European level, through the specific activities of this project that engages a transnational community of 24 parental educators and relevant institutions.
The project No left behind Children was a necessity at the time it has been submitted because it addressed a major problem of the contemporary societies (migration and children that are left behind). The leader of the project is based in Romania, one of the countries with the highest number of children that have been left behind and therefore international cooperation and exchange of views was a perspective to explore. Together with 5 partners from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus, we have looked into needs of the educators that are working both with parents and children during the challenging experience of migration. We have discovered the urgent need of developing competences that are suitable to address the emotional and social needs of the parents and children. Along the needs of the educators, the project has also explored the needs of the parents (mostly the needs related to emotional security and constant communication with the children that have stayed at home). We discovered different national contexts in the 6 project countries, with different specificities, but we were bold and brought under the same umbrella the needs and the problems, seeking solutions for them.