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Integration package for unemployed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers

The project integration package for unemployed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers stems from an ongoing effort to assist primarily labour migrants in terms of informing them about legal changes and possibilities related to labour market access and general integration. While initially focusing on unemployed migrant workers, asylum seekers, and refugees, the project also aims to include the migrant youth. Its goal is a more general migrant social inclusion, at the same time as keeping in mind the necessity to contribute to migrant equality in terms of labour market access and access to full workers' rights and benefits. As a specific outlet, the project team has recently also started to issue a special monthly newsletter, called Migrant news ("Migrantski novi nik"). The main purpose of the newsletter is to inform migrant workers directly about ongoing legal changes, work field, cases of companies, etc. The newsletter is distributed directly to migrant workers - that means going to workers’ dormitories, and frequent points of gathering. Migrant news are issued in two languages – Slovenian and BCMS. The publication has been very well received.

Project Goal

The issues addressed by Migrant news are primarily lack of information and social isolation of migrants - they have been frequently cut from direct social ties with the community. They live together in workers’ hostels and work long hours, so they basically don’t know the meaning of "work-life balance". This is the reason why they are under-informed – not only about their basic social and workers’ rights, but also about social events or to say community issues. The starting point of the action was therefore to directly and correctly inform migrant workers about all important issues, which should all form a part of their life. The goal of the project is to make Migrant news a strong, credible and regular direct source of quality information for migrant workers. Operational goal is to make Migrant news on the "migrants for migrants" basis – so that migrant workers would write articles for their colleagues. The goal is to make Migrants Newsletter a regular monthly bulletin, with at least 100 copies per each issues, and also to make the distribution broader, so not only in the Ljubljana region. Basic assumptions, nationalities and theoretical models behind the practice arise from the work of Brazilian educator and theorist of critical pedagogy Paolo Freire. Regarding the "critical pedagogy" there is no static definition of "critical pedagogy," as the term has undergone many transformations as educators have deployed new strategies to confront changing social and historical contexts, the term has traditionally referred to educational theory and teaching and learning practices that are designed to raise learners' critical consciousness regarding oppressive social conditions (Critical pedagogy on the Web).

How it works

Described practice involves the following actions:

  • The project team collects interesting information that might be useful for migrants (immigration law – employment, work and residence and the experience and best practices from the field)
  • Designing the Migrants newsletter - also prepared by the project team
  • Direct distribution of the Migrant news - work done by the broader team of the project

In between the numbers our broader project team collects all the important information, of course also about the field work with migrants.

Results

So far we have issued two numbers of Migrant news - in May and June.

Each number was issued in 100 copies and directly distributed to migrants’. The Newsletter is also issued electronically.  

The users opinion of the activity is so far very good- all the issues are taken within few days. In future we are planning also to actively involve migrant’ to write articles.

Evaluation

It is planned to have ex post evaluation of the action each six months. Evaluation indicators to be used are:
  • Number of copies for each issue of Migrant news
  • Frequency of issues of Migrant news
  • Scale of topics covered in the issues of Migrant news
  • Number of migrants’ who are writing for the Migrant news
  • Number of direct distributions of each issue of Migrant news
  • Number of direct proposals for improvements from migrants’
  • Number of proposals from migrants which were realised
Because we have issued only two numbers of Migrant news, the ex post evaluation has not yet taken place.

Who benefits

Beneficiaries from the action are migrants themselves, because the Migrant news is meant to be "for them - with them".
We expect that the coverage of the action should be broader each month, so that at the end of the project we could have a network of at least 1,000 regular beneficiaries.

Funding and resources

Source of funding for this action is the project "Integration package for unemployed migrants, refugees and asylum". The project is 85% co-funded by European social fund and 15 % by Slovenian Ministry of labour, family and social affairs.

For the action to be taken, we are using a team of 5 workers, of which 3 are directly employed on the project.

About this good practice

Details

Posted by
Veronika Bajt
Country Coordinator

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