Month: May 2024

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IN2PREV-en News Projects

National Mentoring Event for Social Entities working with Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Daniel Pérez García, researcher at the Euro-Arab Foundation and coordinator of IN2PREV

This morning, the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies held a national mentoring event aimed at leading professionals from social organisations, NGOs and mediation services working with asylum seekers and refugees. The director of the Department of Research and Projects, Javier Ruipérez Canales, together with the coordinator of this activity and researcher of this department, Daniel Pérez García, and Celia Sánchez Villarejo, both researchers of this department, have explained what the mentoring programme Approaching mentoring for a successful inclusion of Refugees and Asylum Seekers of the European project IN2PREV of which the Euro-Arab consortium is part of, and whose objectives include fostering cooperation and collaboration between police forces and NGOs representing refugees and asylum seekers. It also aims to establish accompaniment and inclusion strategies, adapting them to each context and improving the skills of professionals, thus mitigating any risk of vulnerability initially detected.

This mentoring programme, which will take place in 2025 simultaneously in Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia, Moldova, Portugal, Poland and Romania, is a group mentoring process, where each mentor can have up to 3 mentees. It includes a preparation phase for mentorees, as well as session plans that will help to create a safe space for the mentorees and foster better communication and the development of a climate of trust between the mentorees and the host community.

Thematic organisation of each mentoring session

A total of twelve mentoring sessions with an approximate duration of one and a half hours each have been established. They will deal with: 1. needs assessment; 2. bureaucratic issues involved in the migration process of the mentored persons; 3. integration into the host community with, for example, an open discussion on the differences and similarities between the country of origin and the host country; 4. language barriers; 5. religion and culture; 6. job search and the working environment; 7. educational environment; 8. social integration; 9. mental health; 10. health care system; 11. the connection with the country of origin and 12. reflection and closing session.

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EN PARTES News Projects

«From Margins to Targets: How to Counter Exclusion and Protect Religious Minorities»

Since March 2023, the PARTES project («Participatory approaches to protecting places of worship» – more information here), funded by the EU, has been investigating attacks on religious communities and respective places of worship. Their findings show that minority faiths are more likely to be targeted than mainstream religions. However, the question of the social motivations of this phenomenon remains to be answered.

Read the complete article by our researcher José Luis Salido here.

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EUKH EN News Projects RADICALIZACION EN

We participate in the RAN YOUNG meeting where youth take the floor to confront polarisation and hate speeches

The third meeting of the RAN Practitioners Young Platform, the platform of young people, experts on radicalisation and prevention of the European Commission’s Radicalisation Awareness Network, took place in Zagreb (Croatia) on 2nd and 3rd May. Among the participants was Euro-Arab Foundation researcher Daniel Pérez García who together with the other young people explored the local impact of global challenges, such as war and international conflicts, on European youth and created proposals to mitigate the different repercussions on themselves and their communities.

Daniel Pérez García, researcher at the Euro-Arab Foundation, participates in RAN Young Practitioners

The recommendations revolved around four themes: mental health, polarisation, hate speech and hate crime. The Euro-Arab researcher was part of the hate crime group, which addressed how hate speech and hate crimes can precede atrocities, including genocide, or the use of social media and digital platforms as facilitators of the spread of hate.

The meeting concluded that hate speech, along with misinformation, leads to stigmatisation, discrimination and violence on a large scale, and emphasised the need not to underestimate the influence of global conflicts on individuals that can even lead to collective trauma.

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News

The Euro-Arab closes ties with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

The Euro-Arab Foundation, together with the universities of Almeria, Granada, Jaen, Alicante, Salamanca, Valladolid and San Jorge, were part of the Spanish delegation that travelled to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in April. This trip included an interesting and very full agenda of visits to two countries that are of great interest to Spain in terms of the possibility of expanding both academic and scientific cooperation with them. The trip was organised by the Spanish Service for the Internationalisation of Education.

The Euro-Arab Foundation, represented by Antonio Sánchez Ortega, Executive Secretary of the Granada-based institution, was part of this Spanish delegation, which had a busy and very interesting agenda with the universities of Samarkand and Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty and Astana in Kazakhstan.

Collaboration agreement with the Uzbek institute Kamoliddin Behzod

For the Executive Secretary of the Euro-Arab Foundation, “this trip and the contacts made during it have been highly interesting, among them we should highlight the one with the National Institute of Fine Art and Design (Kamoliddin Behzod), with which the Euro-Arab Foundation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding”. This collaboration framework, signed by Antonio Sánchez, on behalf of the Euro-Arab Foundation, and Abbosjon Mirzorahimov, rector of this university, “offers a framework of institutional cooperation for cultural exchange and development of collaborative projects in the field of the culture of understanding and diversity”, as Sánchez pointed out.

Categories
EN PARTES News Projects

The PARTES consortium meets in Brussels to exchange achievements and learnings

The entities associated in PARTES, the European project that seeks to protect places of worship, met on April 22nd and 23rd in Brussels in order to share the lessons learned and achievements reached so far. The Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies is part of it and its researcher, José Luis Salido Medina, coordinated the PARTES Conference held in Melilla in March, which brought together representatives of different religious confessions.

Our reasearcher attended both, the workshop on April 22, and the Steering Committee on the 23rd. The workshop discussed the current challenges and issues that places of worship are facing. It also addressed the importance of bridging the communication gaps that may exist between the various religious communities and between them and the authorities. On its part, the fourth meeting of the PARTES Steering Committee was held to evaluate the work of the project over the past four months, identify key issues for discussion and develop a collaborative plan for the coming months.

Currently, the PARTES consortium is compiling local communication and security strategies to protect places of worship in ten European Union countries.