European projects list

Family and the new generations

Children living with a mentally ill person are at a significantly greater risk to develope short and long term mental health problems or psychosocial difficulties. The lack of and need for better knowledge and training of the child care professionals is underlined by the scientific community, as well as the lack of pan-European guidelines for promoting healthy behaviour in children of mentally ill parents.

From research carried out during the Rainbow project (2011) financed by the same Programme on legislation, scientific literature and through fieldwork in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Great Britain, we could conclude that institutions should work with more commitment to respect the right to sexual and affective diversity, whereby the problem of trans/homophobia and trans/homophobic bullying (including language) remains often hidden and unchallenged. We will study family discourses, needs and strategies as well as exchanging best practices of support, in order to enlarge the debate with institutions, LGBT families, families with LGBT youngsters, families with children and youth who have been victims of trans/homophobic bullying and straight families, to create spaces and conditions for dialogue or lobbying for positive change in the direction of "breaking the silence" on LGBT issues and to train and sensitise adults especially, but not only, in the education system. The objectives of RAINBOW HAS, in continuity with Rainbow, can be detailed as follows:

• Expanding the knowledge about stereotypes and about homophobia and transphobia, through studying families´ discourses.
• Identifying, analysing and exchanging best practices of services and materials of support for families and individuals with LGBT members or members who suffer(ed) from homophobic and transphobic bullying.
• Promoting respect for diversity and pushing for a trans and homophobia-free environment at school and in the family.
• Making citizens aware of the obstacles and difficulties that make trans, gay and lesbian individuals’ lives difficult.
• Understanding and identifying the main obstacles and resources for creating a legitimate space for LGBT issues in education, in each country and at European level.
• Creating spaces and conditions for dialogue or lobbying for positive change in the direction of "breaking the silence" on LGBT issues.
• Identifying strategies to create effective gay-straight alliances, especially among families´ associations at European level.

The main goal of the project is to define an effective multidimensional intervention programme aimed at improving the integration of unaccompanied foreign minors, ensuring their needs and interests, strengthening both their individual social networks and new form of cooperation within and between services and stakeholders. Unaccompanied minors is a target at high risk of social exclusion and with specific needs which must be regularly reviewed (with a precise attention also to those minors requiring special care, protection or treatment for their physical or mental health). The primary purposes of the project are:

• to elaborate a knowledge-based intervention model to improve helpful practices both of on-going special needs assessment (in order to elaborate coherent life-project for each minors) and common family tracing procedures (in order to map familiar relationships as possible care resources to sustain positive paths and wellbeing and/or to promote family reunification);
• to provide minors with appropriate opportunities of training and education, social and leisure activities, participation in cultural life of the context where they live, increasing the opportunities of interaction with their peers and adults of the host society, including with those belonging to the same national or cultural group in order to provide occasions for the minors to live their own culture, ensuring the respect for diversity together with the promotion of the integration in the collective life
• to build a permanent transnational cooperation within professionals, stakeholders, social workers and all other figures who work with unaccompanied foreign minors to define international measures, to share positive practices concerning the integration of unaccompanied foreign minors.

ESCAPE project aims to foster a transnational knowledge exchange on peer and street violence evidence-based contrast and prevention practices addressed to street living/working children-adolescent with migration background and or belonging to minorities. The project aims also to define an East-West platform development between mainly "new" and "old" EU Member States to foster transnational strategies for promoting effective programmes to prevent and contrast street and peer violence and risk behaviour related to harmfull lifestyles.

The project connects EU gay and lesbian associations, schools, media professionals promoting the rights of children and young people to their sexual identity and who fight against homophobia, in order to study stereotypes and challenge them with educational tools. An action-research targeted to education professionals (teachers mainly, but also educators of informal settings), as well as to children and young people, the final beneficiaries.

'Drugs Overdose Kills One European Per Hour' (EPHA, 2008) - an alarming but reasonably accurate reflection of the most recent reported European figures (EMCDDA, 2009a). This simple headline however does not account for the complex nature of the overdoses reported or the various comorbidities associated with non-fatal overdoses (Warner-Smith et al, 2002). A number of the fatal overdoses reported in the European reports have occurred alongside the presence of other substances e.g. alcohol, benzodiazepines, cocaine which raises important concerns relating to the influence of poly-drug consumption on fatal overdoses (EMCDDA, 2009a). The toxicological reports add weight to the need for interventions which can address these complex needs. Individuals who take an overdose may in some instances receive health care for substance misuse. However evidence is clear that treatments themselves do not necessarily change the behaviours which put them at higher-risk of fatal overdose. ORION aims to utilise an e-health tool in an innovative approach to raise awareness of factors which influence risk overdose in a European population identified as high-risk. By developing a decision analysis model it is possible to identify personalised risks of subsequent overdose and utilise a targeted approach to provide health care to improve awareness and understanding.

TRIP aims to develop at transnational level a prevention and harm reduction approach targeted to the combined use of licit and illicit substances (poly-drug use) by young people in recreational settings, including the finalization of theoretically and empirically validated guidelines for harm reduction and prevention project building and tools for monitoring the project effectiveness and assessing the short-term impact of the interventions delivered. TRIP also aims to further develop the experience and knowledge collected during the project “Prevention of poly-drugs addiction and reduction of drug-related harms programs for young people in recreational settings” - JLS/ DPIP/2007-2/001 where the same TRIP partnership studied 20 EU good practices in prevention and harm reduction projects in recreational settings by empirically operationalize and test the knowledge, the methodologies and the tools previously just theoretically developed.

According to Lisbon objectives in education and training and under the assumption of the important role that schools have for integration (as stressed in EU CBP for immigrant integration policy), considered that valorisation of human capital is a primary asset not only for social integration issues, but also for a knowledge-based competitiveness benefit, in particular in time of economic downturn and labour market difficulties, the proposal, focusing on secondary education (11-18 years old students) aims to improve comparative knowledge on good practises of assessments and recognition of knowledge, skills and competences of migrant students entering and exiting the education system, in order to adapt teaching skills, to avoid the placement of migrant children in lower than their age-appropriate grades and to support new forms of knowledge certification useful for job research and mobility. The project wants also to promote an effective mutual exchange at translocal level between educational staff to share experiences and to identify common criteria to disseminate good practices in assessing and recognizing of migrant students competences and to improve equity and wellbeing in education, involving also migrant families.

The project has the general objective of expanding the knowledge-base on the available services of each geographical area, exchange experiences and good practices, creating a set of self-assessment indicators on the quality of the services, with a European scope. Besides, in Lombardia Region: testing of the set of indicators and selection of criteria for the accreditation of the regional services targeted to minors victims of violence.

The project aims to promote social inclusion of young care leavers in the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine through public-private partnerships. The project expect to achieve: increasing knowledge about constraints suffered by young care leavers, existing services in their support, challenges still to be faced and potentialities to be developed by Non State Actors and Local Authorities in each country; improving operational capacities of Non State Actors and Local Authorities in pursuing their mission; implementing effective supporting services for 600 young care leavers by Non State Actors and Local Authorities; increasing Non State Actors and Local Authorities influence on local and national decision making processes affecting young care leavers’ destiny.

The main aim is to contribute to locally develop effective social policies aimed to promote social inclusion of young people leaving child protection residential settings (such as institutions and community based services).
The operative objectives are:

• to offer policy-makers and social service providers evidence based on ad hoc transnational social experimentation to evaluate the possibility to introduce in their respective child protection systems the professional figure of the "social intermediary" able to support (before and after) young people leaving residential settings to approach the new challenging social context;
• the improvement of the quality of services for care leaving.

This programme intends to co-finance the operating expenses that enable European Federation of Street Children to implement a range of activities envisaged in their work programmes that contribute to the development and implementation of one or several of the objectives of the Daphne III programme, such as contributing to the prevention of, and the fight against, all forms of violence occurring in the public or the private domain against children, young people and women, including sexual exploitation and trafficking in human beings, by taking preventive measures and by providing support and protection for victims and groups at risk.

The project intends to address the lack of knowledge in three European geographical areas (Regione Puglia in Italy, the Region Wallonie in Belgium and Paìs Vasco in Spain) about: on one side, the characteristics and diffusion of the phenomenon of violence against women; on the other side, and this is the main added value of the project, the characteristics of actions and services available on the surveyed territories for this target.

According to UNICEF, children in institutions find themselves at a higher risk of exploitation, abuse and neglect. Violence against children in residential facilities takes a number of forms:

• violence within residential care. Child-to-child violence is often not less significant than that perpetrated by the staff. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has recently notified Romania of its concerns about violence in care facilities. In Bulgaria the number of incidents of violence of older over younger children within institutions is so alarmingly high that the impression is that violence is the basic mean of communication. We can assume that such high incidence of physical violence is related to other forms such as verbal violence.
• unwarranted and/or inappropriate placements. international research overwhelmingly shows that for children under three-five years of age, placements in residential (as opposed to family-based) facilities because has long-term detrimental effects can be qualified as “acts of violence” in themselves.

The specific objective of the project proposal is the empowerment of social care providers (local public authorities and not for profit organisations) operating in the areas of the partnership so as to increase their capacity to prevent, detect and manage these types of violence suffered by children living in residential care.

The consumption of drugs in recreational settings is increasing in Europe and it is becoming a growing phenomenon especially among young people. The recreational settings, and in particular the night-life ones, represent the best places where to implement actions for preventing and reducing drug use, dependence and drug-related harms. While in other prevention contexts (i.e. school) many studies and research about the effectiveness of the programmes are available, the knowledge-base is not so developed regarding prevention in recreational settings. This for two main reasons: prevention in recreational settings is at the moment only translated into experimental actions, while prevention in traditional contexts like school, peer groups or local community is not; the traditional methodologies of epidemiological research adopted for the evaluation of prevention programmes are not applicable to these kinds of action, because it is not possible to have a stable sample during time (time-series).The project proposed aimed to fill these knowledge-gaps through research and analysis actions promoted by an interdisciplinary transnational workgroup in order to improve the knowledge base and the exchange of information about the prevention and reduction of drug-related harms programs in recreational environments.

The care leavers are post-institutionalised young people that have to leave the residential placements where they have grown when reaching 18 years old. Young care leavers who lived for a long period of time the experience of a protective measure outside their birth-family represent a target-group of persons at great risk of poverty and social exclusion. These young people are often absolutely de-socialised, without any family-relationship, without daily autonomy, without neither skills nor chances for job employment, often without housing opportunities, exposed to different kinds of exploitation such as child trafficking, prostitution, criminal activities, begging, etc. (this is especially true in Eastern European countries), at risk of social and psychological disease and deviance. The project aims at studying their experience of transition to the outside world and evaluating possible services of support they might have received, as well as their main needs.