“Step In! Building Inclusive Societies through Active Citizenship“
The project's consortium is composed of educational experts and practitioners from seven different institutions from Cyprus, CzechRepublic, Italy, Germany, Slovenia and Sweden and Scotland and our associate partner is Scottish Mentoring Network. This project is funded through support from the European Commission.
The Step In project consists of partners from universities, research institutes, NGOs and adult education providers. The seven partner countries combine their competencies in the fields of civic education, integration, and migration.
Introduction:
Migration since World War II has been the biggest focus in Europe, which has brought with them multiple benefits to the host societies across Europe, from socio-economical to enriched cultures and food. The aim is to develop seven different education modules and competencies and one of the modules is a mentoringscheme guide which will support building inclusive society through encouraging active citizenship and promotion of civic engagement. BEMIS Scotland is one of the partners on the Step-In Programme which aims to develop an innovative education strategy to increase political participation and civic engagement of migrants and ethnic minorities, and to promote active citizenship through Mentoring and through other different educational modules, which will be tested and implemented all over Europe. The project accommodates the fact that successful processes of integration demand not only efforts by the minorities, but also further development of the host countries majorities and institutions.
The target groups of the project are migrants and members of ethnic minorities, members of receiving countries, especially stakeholders, NGOs, public authorities, and adult learning professionals and providers.This project has developed, testing and disseminating innovative approaches, methods and materials to promote migrants’ activecitizenship.Collecting examples of good practice; developing new methods and approaches; teaching aids, developing national and international in-service training courses for adult education staff
Outcomes:
The Mentoring guide and other educational modules will help deploy the mentoring structures and competencies and civic participation educational modules to help produce integration strategies for host countries migrants. Integration is a two way process, migrant to adopt and host society to address the barriers that can prevent economic and social participation. All educational modules and competencies have been designed in accordance with the findings from the migrant’s needs analysis and from the education policies. BEMIS, as a partner, has developed the mentoring programme in parallel with a mentoring scheme, including recruitment of mentors and mentees and how to evaluate and validate the programme at the end.It is assumed that not all mentees will have a good understanding of the native language of the participating country (region within the country). Mentees will be drawn from the migrant/ ethnic minorities in each participating country. One of the key aims of all the modules is to enable learners to be able to fully contribute to decision making process in their local communities both at a local or national level.
In addition, to promote positive action and interaction amongst civic society and the migrant communities, the educational modules and the mentoring program aredesigned to bridge the gap between the migrants and the citizens of host countries by giving access to information and helping the migrant to overcome barriers to civic participation, ignorance, discrimination in civil life, and institutional discrimination. Through the mentoring guide for trainers and service providers we hope to engage migrant communities in broader civic participation through mentoring both at a grassroots level and national level in order to overcome barriers to civic participation. The education modules will provide a clear and dynamic focus on all its modules which will be a definite part of the European Wide Grundtvig Training Course for adult educators and beneficiaries from migrant and ethnic minority communities.
The Grundtvig Training Course will be delivered over five days at the end of the project to adult educators in November.
Tanveer Parnez (Director of National Development)
BEMIS