The official launch meeting of the VALUES project ‘Volunteering Activities to Leverage Urban and Social inclusion of migrants’ was held on 14 and 15 March in Brussels. Representatives from all 16 partner cities (Amsterdam, Bristol, Brno, Cesena, Dusseldorf, Madrid, Nuremberg, Oslo, Ostend, Riga, Sheffield, Terrassa, Thessaloniki, Toulouse, Turin and Zurich) along with two expert partner organisations (MigrationWork and the European Volunteer Centre – CEV) attended the two-day meeting. EUROCITIES, lead project partner, organised and chaired the event while MigrationWork and CEV provided training and guidance on the methodology and project activities.
The first day started with a general introduction by EUROCITIES on the Integrating Cities Charter and previous projects, the framework of VALUES and its main objectives. It continued with a presentation on the EU project financial rules by Hortensia Velez Patón, project officer at the European Commission Directorate General Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME), who presented the changes to EU financial rules adopted by the Commission in recent years.
In the afternoon, MigrationWork expert facilitators actively engaged the partners on the VALUES methodology through a mix of presentations, interactive exchange and games. Focused group sessions continued the next day tackling aspects such as outputs and goals of the project, transferability of good practices, communities of practice and action planning.
The final four breakout sessions gathered each city in one of the four ‘clusters’, chaired by their respective expert facilitator. The cluster sessions allowed the partners to discuss expectations and challenges in relation to the project implementation in a collaborative way, and define cities’ needs and possible gaps for the first round of cluster visits. These visits will implement a new methodology that moves away from the ‘mentor-mentee’ method used in CITIES GROW, VALUES project’s ‘predecessor’ and will take place between May 2019 and June 2020.
For more information contact Rossella Nicoletti, EUROCITIES project coordinator migration and integration (email: rossella.nicoletti@eurocities.eu / phone: + 32 2 552 0864)
