The JeS project provided a valuable opportunity to explore various approaches to safeguarding human rights across European countries and promoting human rights awareness and the inclusion of the often left-out migrant voices, especially in HEIs. With its activities, JeS wanted to empower migrants by including their voices and encouraging them to take ownership of their own narratives that are often left out from the main narratives in our societies. The act of including also in HE personal eStories and sharing them to generate empathy and connection, through different creative methods such as Story Circles or Multisensory Spaces, is innovative in nature, and the JeS partners wanted to be part of this process. With its digital JeS Toolkit creation, JeS also sought to build novel bridges between higher education and the NGO sector, so that co-creation and experiential knowledge could become an integral part of different education, training and research activities. For HEI partners, this also meant strengthening our shared goal to place inclusion, diversity, and social justice at the heart of our educational programmes, thus contributing to the goal of promoting inclusion and representation of migrants in society.
The EU is committed to promoting democracy, human dignity, and human rights, and therefore seeks to integrate these principles across all its policies, higher education (HE) included. In this context, the JeS project aimed to incorporate a broad range of human rights related themes - especially those connected to migration and fair trade - into everyday teaching practices across diverse partner countries and study programmes. As students will become future professionals and policymakers, both HE institutions and youth-focused NGOs have a responsibility to ensure that learners, teachers and educators gain a thorough understanding of these key issues and acquire practical approaches for raising awareness. Strengthening such competences is essential for building more inclusive educational environments and fostering genuine intercultural dialogue that supports long-term peacebuilding. Recognising the need for accessible and innovative pan-European human rights materials, especially personal migrant eStories and multilingual educational resources, the JeS project developed an open digital JeS Toolkit. The toolkit was designed to address varied user needs while advancing inclusive education and amplifying migrant voices across Europe.