This Tuesday took place the official online launch of the ReBel (Redesign Belonging) project, which aims to address the challenges of our society related to solidarity and a sense of belonging by providing a co-creation model that fosters belonging and empowers migrant women who have been in host countries for more than five years. They will be the cornerstone and will collaborate with professional designers to create models and solutions for different contexts in the project’s development countries: Spain, Finland and the Netherlands.
ReBel has a duration of 20 months and is co-financed with 411,455 euros from the European Commission in the framework of the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV) and will be coordinated by the Finnish university Laurea of Applied Sciences. Together with Laurea, the project consortium includes the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Education (Spain), the international organisation What Design Can Do (The Netherlands) and the VISIO training centre (Finland). The Euro-Arab Foundation will be responsible for carrying out the research and benchmarking part of local, national and international projects focusing on migrant belonging. The results will be used to develop a survey to elicit migrants’ experiences and feelings of belonging.
Spain to host a meeting of migrant women
Euro-Arab will be in charge of the activities in Spain, which will take place in parallel in the other countries involved, bringing together migrant women with local citizens, NGO representatives, local and regional authorities, in workshops where open dialogue between the groups will be promoted. Migrants will be able to present the obstacles they faced, and continue to face, in integrating into the host society, as well as their resilience strategies. NGOs will also have the opportunity to talk about their experiences with regard to employment, education, hate crimes or xenophobia.
These workshops will then be used to develop improvements that both authorities and NGOs can implement in their day-to-day work. In order to involve policy makers, Euro-Arab will organise a roundtable in Spain, which will also include members of the European Commission. The researchers will draft three policy briefs per country which will be made public and translated into the main languages of migrants to ensure their accessibility.
Upcoming events
On 5 July, WDCD will organise an event in Amsterdam where the project will be presented and in September the official presentation in hybrid format (face-to-face and online) will take place in Finland.
