The project wants to respond to youth learning priority: Inclusive training as it aims to develop, by the medium of youth educators, social and civic competences among the project second target: youth new migrants and refugees. In addition, this project is designed to contribute to the youth priority of promoting high-quality youth education, as it is going to design, implement, test and disseminate an effective educational tool able to support youth educators in developing their daily activities and their channels of communication, In this respect, the specific objectives of the project are: The project is going to work on two intellectual outputs: a series of comic strips focused on the project topics - EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy - and an annexed guide. The medium of the comic strips has been chosen because comics are known to be one of the most powerful and effective communication tools, above all in the youth field; the guide has been planned in order to support youth educators in their role of multi-target and multi-topic providers of non-formal learning opportunities. The guide will accompany youth educators, step by step, through the process of using comics to communicate. Through it, youth educators will be able, without outside help, to re-process the comics and exploit them with a wide range of different target profiles (in general disadvantaged youth in society ) in different contexts and starting from different topics. The intellectual outputs implementation will be improved by the partnership with the support of a multicultural youth educators representing, at the best, European multiculturalism and diversity. Starting from these core priorities and objectives, the project profile widens its horizon looking at the world around with the aim to promote effective educational tools able to get positive results with people of different backgrounds; to experience an alliance between youth leaders centers, educational providers, NGO including immigration and refugee centers and public bodies on the focused issues and finally to experience and promote an innovative cross sectorial partnership (one NGO dealing with immigration issues; a social communication agency, an association whose core mission is integration and European cooperation in the youth field of education) able to reinforce the dialogue among highly different, but complementary entities. The project "Enhancing Social Integration with Comics - ESIC" activities will take place 24 months, in 4 countries across Europe those have the highest number of refugees and tackling with challenges such as UK, Turkey, France and Netherlands. Project overall goal is to design, implement and test innovative and interactive educational tools for youth educators/trainers in order to support them in developing their daily activities and their channels of communication with their target groups towards their integration path by allowing them to understand and increase the knowledge of the hosting society’s language, history, institutions is crucial for successful integration. Objectives are: To build capacity of youth workers To produce material to facilitate the process of social integration of refugees To promote and enhance social integration of immigrants and refugees To use art as a tool for daily work of youth workers The participants to the project, during its whole cycle, are about 200 including also people with fewer opportunities. The participants will actively take part to a focus group phase, to the testing phase, to a series of dissemination labs in youth leaders centers and NGOs (involving at least 150 youth leaders) and to the multiplier events: - meetings for insiders"and professionals that are going to be a medium to valorize, within a multi-target network, the importance of the high quality of youth learning. The project main results are the release of the project outcomes on the main OER platforms, on Erasmus + project results database, on the project website and on each partner's website; a strong local dissemination plan of actions supported by the most popular media among youth the direct involvement of about 300 people; the establishment of an alliance network among all people involved in youth education and the development of a “word of mouth” network on the project topics. At the end of project, more youth workers with qualified skills ( such as participants of TOT) with have better work with their organizations and this will lead integration of more young people. More NGOs will be active to promote social integration by using the tools/outcomes of project. Youth workers that working with integration will have new innovative tools to use in their daily work with refugees and young immigrants. These will lead to more cohesive societies and better integration of immigrants in host communities. As well as youth workers, NGOs, educational institutions will creative tools to use in their daily work
Project overall goal was to design, implement and test innovative and interactive educational tools for youth educators/trainers in order to support them in developing their daily activities and their channels of communication with their target groups towards their integration path by allowing them to understand and increase the knowledge of the hosting society’s language, history, institutions is crucial for successful integration. Objectives were: To build capacity of youth workers To produce material to facilitate the process of social integration of refugees To promote and enhance social integration of immigrants and refugees To use art as a tool for daily work of youth workers We aimed to build capacity of youth workers, our partners and produce new tools that can duplicated or applied by other youth organization to promote social integration immigration through creative tools. By promoting social integration we aimed to have more harmonized communities and stronger social cohesion.
According to latest report by Eurostat, Monitoring social inclusion in Europe (2017 edition http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/8031566/KS-05-14-075-ENN.pdf/c3a33007-6cf2-4d86-9b9e-d39fd3e5420c) has found that the EU has not made any progress towards achieving its ‘Europe 2020’ social inclusion target, adopted in 2010, of lifting at least 20 million people from poverty and social exclusion by 2020. According to this report 22% of nationals, 28% of foreign EU citizens and 50% of non-EU citizens in the EU faced the risk of being in poverty or socially excluded. These statistics were the main drive for us to develop our project. Respond to the need to: - improve the quality of learning - offer to youth leaders an informal learning tool to help them in their role as providers of non-formal learning opportunities to different targets - give youth leaders an easy tool to be exploited in their daily work - empower youth leaders and young new migrants and refugees - offer them flexible, updated, easy tailored made instruments - promote the participation and active citizenship among new target groups - improve young new migrants and refugees' knowledge of the heritage, habits and language of the hosting country.