Non-formal tools for immigration youth workers

Aims of the tool

It can be used by practitioners in order to help immigrants, refugees and other minorities integrate in the host countries and local community.

Description of the tool

"Non-formal tools for immigration youth workers" was a seminar organized by the Romanian youth organization D.G.T. and that took place in Romania, at Casa Seciu, in Prahova county, Romania, between 24th May-04 June 2019. It was a learning mobility funded by the Erasmus+ program of European Commission and it offered to 21 youth workers the opportunity to meet and work together for 10 days in order to improve their professional competences with regards to the topics of migrants/refugees, social inclusion and cultural dialog. The participants came from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania and Turkey. The main learning framework used was the non-formal education, which helped the participants to actively contribute their knowledge and skills to the implementation of the seminar. The seminar was led by a team of one expert in immigration and two facilitators who took the participants through the basic concept of migration in order to level up their knowledge and guided them through the debates, exercises, role-playing games. The meeting also included two study-visits at ARCA and AIDRom, which are two Romanian NGOs that work in the field of refugees and migration integration, in Bucharest, during which the participants got the chance to find out more about good practices in relation to refugees and migrants’ integration and interact with some of the beneficiaries of these organizations. The participants also received the visit of two experts from UNHCR Romania, who held a 1-day session on various topics such as myths and facts about latest migration phenomenon, vulnerable groups, discrimination, hate crime, general concepts on refugees, perception and representation in the hosting community and so on. After having received the theoretical background, the participants had to work in mixed teams in order to develop their own integrational tools that can be further used by other youth workers/NGOs with their beneficiaries, such as immigrants or refugees. This was done through taking several steps, as for instance brainstorming, choosing most relevant ideas, creating the teams, designing the workshops, getting feed-back from the expert, testing with their new tools together with the other participants and giving the last touch to their work. Below you may see the 6 methods mentioned above, that we encourage you to use with your beneficiaries, either in their actual version or as you may want to adapt to your needs.

We have also created the project's website which can be accessed by clicking the following link: https://nonformaltoolsimmigration.wordpress.com/