Social inclusion of Refugee Families and Young People
Who is this toolkit for?
This Toolkit is designed to support and inspire youth workers carrying out activities with, and supporting, young refugees and asylum seekers. Readers will be invited to analyse their own practice and skills, whilst being provided tools and ideas to use in order to promote social inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers.
Despite being targeted primarily at youth workers, the Toolkit might provide useful support and knowledge to people working in broader contexts such as NGOs, other civil-society organisations, social workers and humanitarian workers. The activities included might also be beneficial for organisations hosting volunteers.
Contents of Toolkit 2
The contents have been divided into two parts which are presenting two ways how to face the problem. Part of the toolkit is aimed at providing individual skills and knowledge in order to better define and understand the problem of social exclusion; whilst the second part provides tools and ideas that can be replicated during educational activities with the target group.
The first part of the Toolkit defines and examines Social Inclusion from a policy point of view. After providing a policy review and needs assessment, the reader will be led through the section of self-reflection exercises. These are intended to serve as a tool to reflect about exclusion factors, but also to improve empathy, which is deemed to be an important skill for youth workers involved with young people with a migrant background.
The second part of the Toolkit includes examples of activities that can be used with young refugees, explaining the aims of each activity, how to organise them and a commentary on how you might modify these for your own setting and context. In addition, a section about possible project ideas is included. This is a collection of local and European financed projects which have proven effective in promoting the inclusion of the target groups.
The division reflects the double theoretical asset that the toolkit provides:
- Bottom-up approach, as the exercises have been drawn upon professional practices,
- Top-down approach, as the exercises and initiatives proposed include interventions directly linked to social exclusion but also stigma-reducing interventions.
The PAPYRUS team recognises that some youth workers will integrate the activities intermittently across other activities and schedules they have in their work and others may opt to create dedicated and focused days. This is up to you and the activities can be adapted to make sense within your own programmes, recognising that you may already have some useful materials that you regularly utilise yourselves.