e-VELP’s primary aim is to enable young migrants/refugees to create and offer free workshops that tap into their talents to share their knowledge and culture. The program will work to ease their integration into their new environment and open more opportunities for finding work. Building an active community of motivated young migrant/refugee volunteer educators (VEs) and youth volunteer educator trainers (VE-Trainers) is an essential part of the growth foreseen for the e-VELP project.
Project duration: April 2020 - March 2022
Context:
The project’s idea originated from the rising concern for young migrant/refugee conditions that increased upon the arrival of an estimate of 1 million refugees into the EU in 2015. Majority of the migrants come from the youth sector, highly motivated yet low in skills. The skills gap poses a challenge to their assimilation into their new community. Consequently, a rise in politicisation increased fears and discrimination within the welcoming countries particularly due from a lack of personal contact.
The innovation of the e-VELP project is slated to provide solutions to these aforementioned issues by preparing young migrants/refugees to create and facilitate workshops. The project will enable personal contact, thus encouraging knowledge-sharing, skills development, openness, and cultural diversity within the community.
Objectives:
The overall objective of the project is to contribute to a better integration of young migrants and refugees in European society and to improve EU citizens' views of migrants/refugees.
The specific objective of the project is to create Young Volunteer Educators e-Learning Program (e-VELP). e-VELP provides tools and a framework to equip young migrants/refugees with new skills in the conception, development and implementation of workshops for hosting organisations requiring these trainings.
The project results will be made accessible for and disseminated among youth organisation and governmental bodies wishing to empower migrants and disadvantaged youth in their societies. The system change objective is to introduce and promote new role of Volunteer Educator (VE) in the civil-society non-formal educational system. VEs are young migrants/refugees who are passionate to share their knowledge/culture and are trained to become presenters and workshop facilitators in their field of expertise.
Activities that will be carried out to achieve results:
Through the grant provided by Erasmus+, we will create an e-learning platform and supplementary offline activities that both aim to guide VEs and VE-Trainers in their progressive journey. Thirty (30) young migrants/refugees will participate in the e-VELP training and hold sixty (60) workshops, while twelve (12) youth workers will join the program as VE-Trainers to support the VEs. A year after the end of the project, the target is to train 3,500 young migrants/refugees.
Within the online platform will be an extensive collection of resources such as an online course and collaboration opportunities and exchange of teaching materials to support VEs. Apart from online courses, VE-Trainers will also be given resources to effectively guide VEs such as support in organising offline training, workshops and meetings.
The project’s final release and dissemination will involve six (6) multiplicator events that will expose the project to EU-wide key stakeholders that will ensure exposure of e-VELP within the whole European consortium. By the end of the project, the reach of the results is estimated at 260.000 individuals, 300 youth organisations or educational institutions, and fifty (50) national/EU/international networks related to youth/non-formal/formal education.
Partners: TeachSurfing (Germany), social enterprise - will serve as coordinator and will bring their expertise in non-formal training for volunteer teachers and software development; Center for Social Innovation CSI (Cyprus) private company - with expertise in designing and developing gamified online courses; Vilnius University (Lithuania) with expertise in research focused on teacher education, education policy and management, and cultural and inter-cultural aspects of formal and non-formal educational programs; Verein Multikulturell (Austria) non-governmental association – with expertise in social inclusion and educational programs for migrants/refugees; CESIE (Italy) non-governmental organisation – with expertise in creating online and offline educational programs for youth; and GEYC (Romania).
Project Meetings:
- May 2020, Germany - the meeting will be online due to the current circumstances
- September 2020, Cyprus
- January 2021, Austria
- July 2021, Romania
- February 2022, Italy