The objectives of this project which started back in September 2008 and has been recently concluded have been:

• Improving the professional skills of human rights activists who work in the field of psycho-social needs of refugees
• Sharing experiences and knowledge on psycho-social needs of refugees
• Exchanging strategies and ways of learning
• Awareness raising on psycho-social needs of refugees
• Sharing experiences on problems which NGOs that are working with refugees have
• Sharing experiences on evaluation methods of activities for refugees

The project created in collaboration with other 3 European organisations: IHAD (Turkey), IMIR (Germany) and CEIPES (Italy), has been supported by the European Comission under the Life Long Learning program Grundtvig. Over the project life cycle, we have been participating and organising several workshops,  meetings and awareness raising campaigns.

With this project, RESPECT Refugiados re-affirms once more its initiatives to raise awareness among the civil society, to increase the knowledge about other reality,  the reality of the millions of refugees in the world.

TRAINING MATERIAL

Download here the full version (pdf)

The training material is also available for free download from the project´s website:                                      http://www.psycho-socialneedsofrefugees.eu/

PR MATERIALS

Leaflet:             Spanish Version – English Version
Poster:              Spanish Version – English Version

PICTURES FROM OUR MEETINGS

Ankara, Turkey (16-18 January 2009)

Barcelona, Spain (18-21 June 2009)

Hamburg, Germany (14-17 January 2010)

Palermo, Italy (6-8 May 2010)

We have prepared a comic book dealing with different aspects of a refugee/asylum seeker’s life (such as living in a refugee camp, resettlement, fleeing their own country, etc.). The comics was printed out in 7 different languages and distributed through our partners to schools, student associations, universities, NGOs working with children, etc. of 8 different countries (Switzerland, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Portugal, and Spain).  The purpose of this project was to spread awareness in a fun way about refugees and refugee issues amongst European children, teenagers, young adults and adults.

People of different cultures that have to coexist constitute today’s societies.  This situation has generated and is still generating fear, rejection and problems of coexistence which is expressed through racism and xenophobic acts and intolerance against refugees and asylum seekers.  The latter need to adapt themselves to their new environment/community or country during their stay whether this is for short or long term but this is only possible if they don’t experience rejection from the people of the asylum countries and get their support.  To achieve it, people – children, teenagers, adults – living in the asylum countries have to make an effort to build social relationships that base itself on the cultural diversity of nowadays’ society and on equality in rights and democracy and we think that educating these people and inform them about refugees/asylum seekers’ situation through awareness campaign can help eradicate ignorance that mostly causes rejection of the “others” and promote solidarity and activism.  Our campaign was mainly aimed at youth as they can influence the present and future situation and constitutes citizens of the future.

Main goal

• Spread awareness on refugee and refugee issues among youth aged between 12 and 25 years old.
• Make available a material that will help spread awareness on refugees in the long term among youth and adult. Spread awareness on refugee and refugee issues among youth aged between 12 and 25 years old and adult.
• Promote a multicultural society, tolerance and activism among youth.
• Make available a material that will help spread awareness on refugees in the long term among youth and adult.

Specific goals

• Erase prejudice and show that diversity can enrich ones culture.
• Promote activism among teenagers and young adults.
• Increase people knowledge regarding refugees/asylum seekers and make them want to know more about them.
• Convince students to join the pen pal letter exchange so they can write directly to a refugee student (we will do so by telling the story of a refugee receiving letter and school materials from his pen pal). We hope in the same way to convince schools as a whole to partner with a refugee school so they can provide some direct help and therefore increase our now existing network of schools participating in our letter exchange program.
• If a success, edit more copies and extend the awareness campaign to more countries.

You can already download the brochure created during our “European Campaign to Raise Awareness on Refugee Issues”. Thanks to the support of the European Youth Foundation and the Council of Europe, the work done together with 9 NGOs in 11 different countries all of them under RESPECT’s coordination, has produced a very interesting material to explain children and youth about the reality of the refugees in the world.

We have already printed and distributed the brochure entitled “Refugees and Exile” in schools and youth centers all over the continent in several languages.

The campaign has taken place under the “All Different-All Equal” project from the COE, promoting social values and understanding among peoples and cultures.