Youth Volunteer Educators e-learning Program for young migrants and refugees (e-VELP) (Number: 2019-3-DE04-KA205-018805)
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.
About the project
The innovation of the Young Volunteer Educators e-Learning Program (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. The system change objective of e-VELP is to introduce and promote the new role of Volunteer Educator (VE) in the civil-society non-formal educational system.
e-VELP will enable young migrants/refugees to create and offer free workshops where they share their knowledge and culture with local communities. The project will develop the e-learning platform and supplementary offline activities that both aim to guide VEs and VE-Trainers in their progressive journey. e-VELP is beyond a classic e-learning platform. Its aim is not only to teach migrant/refugee youth new skills but also to create and expand a live and active community of migrant/refugee youth passionate to share knowledge (Volunteer Educators) and youth workers passionate to support them (Volunteer Educator Trainers).
The platform will contain two online courses for the project's two target groups – young migrants/refugees and youth workers. The online course for VEs will include e-learning elements and supplementary offline activities, such as trainings/workgroups and meetups. 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.
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.
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.
Project consortium
Coordinator:
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Teachsurfing |
Partners:
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Social Innovation SIC |
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CESIE Italy https://cesie.org/ |
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GEYC Romania https://www.geyc.ro/ |
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Vilnius University Vilnius, Lithuania http://www.vu.lt/ |