MOBILITY MENTORS – moveurope

MentorME - Mobility Mentors for refugees in Europe

Increase young refugees’ access to cross-border voluntary service opportunities in Europe (both national programmes and ESC), by training mobility mentors who can concretely support them to participate in such opportunities.

Context

For many young people in Europe the completion of a voluntary service remains an important first step towards entering a professional qualification and personal development. The added value is enormous: increased self-confidence, learning new skills, intercultural competence, strengthened identity and development of active citizenship.

Young refugees should have equal access to such opportunities. For them, however, access to existing offers such as national and European Voluntary Services (ESC Programme) is often limited and associated with hurdles. The reasons for this are:

There is no target group-specific information material and approach strategy – both for young refugees themselves and for organisations that want to involve them more actively.
Many young refugees are not familiar with the concept of voluntary work as defined in Europe.
Access for young refugees is complicated: The search for a suitable volunteer position today takes place mainly online; here, in addition to knowledge, digital skills are often lacking, which is hardly possible without competent support.
Young refugees do not have the necessary network to organise their placement or stay independently, e.g. suitable accommodation.
Without trained support, the volunteering experience often leads to frustration or tensions and misunderstandings on both sides – for the young refugees and the hosting/sending organisations
Most of the organisations lack information (legal, bureaucratic, cultural etc.) on how to successfully involve this target group

With MentorMe we want to foster the access to cross-border national and European voluntary service programmes for young refugees in Europe.

Objectives

With MentorMe, we want to create a Cross-European network for mutual support, exchange and collaboration for cross-border volunteering projects for young refugees.

To reach this objective, we aimed at:
→ Training people, mainly youth workers and peers, to become Mobility Mentors being able to guide and accompany young refugees in participating in national and European (ESC) voluntary service programmes in other EU countries (cross-border mobility)
→ Building a Cross-European supporter network, supported by a digital platform connecting mobility mentors throughout all Europe

Activities

Research on existing resources, tools and networks in all partnering countries of the project, i.e. Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Bulgaria, Sweden, Greece
Development, Testing and Publication of a Mobility Mentor Training, including a Mobility Mentor Kit with supporting materials for the guidance of young refugees in cross-border volunteering in Europe. The Training is composed of self-paced learning modules on the HOP Platform and materials for trainers to conduct in-person and online training sessions with groups.
Creation and publication of a Mobility Mentor Platform where all materials are accessible for free.

In the framework of MentorMe, we organised two Learning Teaching Training Activities (LTTAs), one in Pau, France, 2023 and a second one in Parma, Italy, 2024) where we tested together with Youth Workers and young people from the target group the Training and Kit concept and material. As well, we had three Transnational Project Meetings (TPM) at the beginning, middle and end of the project to monitor and evaluate together with all partners the project’s development and impact.

Resources