CIES Onlus - Centro Informazione e Educazione allo Sviluppo

CIES Onlus is a NGO founded in 1983, whose mission is to promote values of solidarity and cooperation, both in its national and international activities. Working divisions of CIES Onlus are: linguistic-cultural mediation, education and training, communication/awareness and events, International Cooperation.
Abroad, CIES is engaged in programs addressed to women, children and youth that live in difficult situation and socio-economic insecurity in Southern Africa, South America and Southeastern Europe.
In Italy, CIES encourages initiatives focused on intercultural and global citizenship education and aimed at developping positive integration of immigrants, both in formal and non formal educational contexts.
Since its birth CIES Onlus has paid special attention to the connection between cooperation and development education, with the goal of achieving a cultural gain from projects implemented in the Global South thanks to information and awareness-raising programmes implemented in Italy. We were among the founders of the Italian Global Citizenship Education Platform [Piattaforma Educazione alla Cittadinanza Mondiale], which led a national debate aimed at redefining the concept of development education.
These programmes and initiatives aimed at education for global citizenship are intended for young people and schools and cultural and social professionals; their goals are shaping public opinion in general, thus helping the people of the world live together in solidarity, developing educational and training strategies to create greater awareness about the problems of Global North-South relationships, migration, human and civil rights, the relationship between development and the environment, and raising awareness on cultural diversity.
We have a long experience in non formal education practices, gained in both our cooperation and global education projects.
Since 2010 we run a Youth Center called Matemù where young people (approx. aged 11-25, Italians, new immigrants, second generation immigrants, unaccompanied minors, most of them in situations of serious social exclusion) from different Countries can meet and experience several activities and services, all of them offered for free. The activities are based both on the delivery of social services (orientation to the world of training and work, teaching Italian as a second language, counseling and tutoring) and non-formal education practices mainly based on art-education (dance, music, singing, spray art, theatre, digital storytelling). The center is a bridge between the city centre and the suburbs, the city's area and the school, among young people and associations and institutions responsible for providing social services.
Our main approaches are: inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural approach, Cooperative learning, active/ interactive techniques (role-play, various games etc.). Over the last ten years, CIES Onlus has been organizing interactive exhibits based on role-playing game: educational paths that combine the acts of listening, seeing and doing by mirroring real and complex situations. The interest toward the topic is stimulated by direct and emphatic involvement of persons. By this mean, problems’ understanding come from a participated experience. During these performances, that consist of several legs, visitors take an active role through the role-playing game methodology. In this way, he/she has the chance to experience forced migration and in general the conditions of refugees, migrants and unaccompanied foreign minors. A trip starts when visitors take on the identity of one of the characters made available. It ends with the grant (or not) of a residency permit in the country of first arrival. The performances are always supported by the use of multimedia technologies, set designs, light and sound effects. This method has been tested as an application of non formal education techniques within formal contexts (ad hoc locations with participation of students, teachers and adults and schools).
In the last three years, our staff explored in particular two methods: Digital Storytelling (DSt) and Forum Theatre. Both of them proved particularly effective both in formal education and non – formal education contexts. In non formal education environments, DSt has been used to teach Italian to migrant young people, and it proved particularly effective in strengthening self-confidence and oral expression skills.
Forum Theatre was also used as an awareness-raising activity on issues related to discrimination, carried out within our youth Centre. This activity directly involved young people attending our Centre on a daily basis, who took part in it in their quality of actors and public. It proved very effective in developing critical thinking and empathy.
CIES Onlus administers also an Intercultural Documentation Center that provides documentary resources to the intercultural activities.
CIES cooperates with many European partners and is a member of several coordinating groups: Concord-European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development (School Curriculum working group), Association of Italian NGO (Development Education Italian Platform – school working group), COCIS-Town Committee for Decentralized Cooperation of the Municipality of Rome, Fair Trade Italy Consortium, "Trialog" Platform.
CIES projects are partly financed by the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs, Education, Labour and Social Affairs, and by the European Union, UN Agencies, Local Authorities, ASL (Local Health Authorities), Foundations, State-owned and private Companies, partners and members, individual citizens and groups