Final meeting WELCOMM Project
Ljubljana, Slovenia 23-24 September 2019
Between September 23 and 24, the five partner organizations, implementing the project “ Supporting integration of third country nationals through developing learning and collaboration tools to build welcoming and inclusive communities “ (WELCOMM) project Including CMS and RCT from Croatia, CESIE from Palermo in Italy, the Slovene Philanthropy from Slovenia, and Südwind from Austria met in Ljubljana in Slovenia, to review the project achievements and discuss the final activities of the project ahead of the completion date of the project on 30 November 2019.
At the start of the first day of the meeting, Ms. Dragana Knezic, the project manager of RCT, which was the lead organization of the project expressed her gratitude to the project partners for a fruitful cooperation and the great motivation throughout the project. Briefing the project partners on the completed activities with regards to the mid-term report, she stressed that the meeting will predominantly focus on the evaluation of the already completed activities aiming at identifying successful practices and identifying gaps and areas of improvement.
The project partners also thanked RCT for a strong leadership of the project and shared some ideas and successful practices they have used in engaging with the third country nationals as well as a community of practice.
Leila Salehiravesh from Südwind pointed out that her team is facilitating meetings and talks on topics relevant to migrants and the community of practice in Austria and uses these events to promote the wealth of information materials and training curricula the project partners have prepared.
Roberta Lo Bianco from CESIE stressed the importance of reviewing what has been done as it was a learning process for everybody. She emphasized that producing the training material was an empowering task and the materials produced, particularly the training material for intercultural competency are already been utilized in other projects.
The representative of Slovenian Philanthropy outlined that the piloting of online language course among third country nationals has been successful and that the NGOs and volunteers have reacted positively to the training they have received on intercultural competencies.
Maddalena Avon from CMS informed partners that her organization is conducting 3 meetings. for different organizations to discuss specific problems and topics such as employment and housing.
The partners also discussed different ways to approach and engage small NGOs and diaspora organizations for future projects to ensure that the projects developed are relevant to their needs.
In the course of the meeting, Maddalena Avon from CMS briefed the partners on the research activity the CMS is carrying out and shared some preliminary findings. The research will be completed in the coming weeks and shared with the partners.
At the end of the first day of the coordination meeting, the CMS and SP Philanthropy organized a round table on challenges and opportunities of integration of new citizens within the EU.
The second day of the meeting was focused on finalizing the online language courses for Slovene and Croatian languages together with CESIE communication expert who is in charge of the online platform. The online language courses are one of the major achievements of the project as there are otherwise not many possibilities for third country nationals to learn these languages.
Before closing the second day of the meeting, the partners agreed on working towards keeping the website alive and updated and promote it through the community of practice. Furthermore, they discussed possible partnerships in the framework of future projects with similar focus.
