More than 6 months have passed since the HeArts of Youth Consortium met in Marseille, France for the Kick-starting the Project. The Project seems to be promising and auspicious from the very start. Engaging the use of art and dance-based therapy tools to facilitate the social inclusion of young migrants, provides a sense of hope and encouragement to many youth-at-risk of exclusion, especially young refugees and migrants around the EU.
The first phase of the Project focused on collecting, through desk-research, different methods and techniques used by art and dance therapy experts. In this way the Partners enhanced their knowledge and skills on such methods and through our expert consortium, created a Methodology Development Document for art and dance therapy experts.
The second phase of the Project included the implementation of a Mutual Learning workshop in the framework of the second Transnational Partnership meeting, for which all Partners travelled to Cyprus. The HFC Team reached out to various youth worker specialists, both internally and externally, to participate in activities which used dance and art methods as well as techniques, with the aim of collecting feedback and comments. The feedback from the workshop carried out was very positive and encouraging, proving the strength and the dynamic of the Project in achieving the best results.
Based on the results collected from the workshop in Cyprus, the project consortium is working on the organization of the Learning Teaching Training and Activities (LTTA) event that will be taking place with youth worker representatives from all partner countries in Palermo, Italy in June. The experts will be creating the training programme that will include both art and dance-based training.
The trained youth workers will then return to their countries and put into practice the acquired knowledge, and everything they learnt by training additional youth workers. The next phase will require the additional youth workers of each EU partner country to work with the youth at risk of exclusion to help eliminate their social gap.