"""The Living Art – The Art of Living"" project is a two years Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for adult education project between 5 organizations from Greece, Italy, Poland, The UK and Turkey. It is addressed to disadvantaged adults learners – people facing educational difficulties, social obstacles, cultural differences and economic obstacles, and teachers/tutors.The main topic of the project is the meaning of art and its impact on human life. Discovering the beauty and art in life allows people to fully discover the value and purpose of life. The project will show the way how to discover the beauty of everyday life, and will help to understand the origin of European culture. Project activities mainly focus on enhancing cultural awareness of adult learners and promote attitudes of tolerance, understanding and openness through education on European cultural heritage. The project creates structure and activities that encourage social cohesion, bringing opportunities for personal development and wellbeing.New learning opportunities (traditional and online) for adult learners will be offered – cultural, motivation and theatre workshops with the support of IT tools. For adult learners this project will be a chance to get new learning experience and for teachers it will be a way to develop own skills and methods on teaching adults. Both, staff and learners, will have an opportunity to rethink their attitudes and reduce their prejudices through European cooperation.The main aim of the project is awakening participants cognitive curiosity, sensitivity to art and beauty, and to other cultures. Specific project objectives: - increase adult learners cultural awareness,- increase adult learners IT skills,- increase adult learners creativity,- develop adult learners key competences, - develop innovative teaching adults methods,- integrate traditional and distance learning,- increase adult learners selfconfidence,- promote learning and creativity by using refreshing actvities into classroom and support the use of new and innovative content and practice of ICT in lifelong learning society.Through a wide range of activities the ""The Living Art – The Art of Living"" project will give disadvantaged adults learners positive learning and cultural experiences and, will motivate them to lifelong learning, to promote their creativity. Planned activities, mainly focus on enhancing cultural awareness, are: cultural, motivational, theatre and IT workshops.The project is designed to awake one's own creativity in adulthood, showing how art is responding to emotions and problems. Planned activities will show that creativity in everyday life might help to solve problems and art might be a way of communication. Workshops for adult learners will be supported by distance learning (via Moodle platform) to increase learners IT skills.The aim of the project is also to create high quality learning opportunities, through the exchange of good practice examples.Theatre workshops will allow to discover that by using the art of word, movement and gesture in the theatre, you can find confirmation of life, and will encourage participants reflection.""The Living Art – The Art of Living"" project will create an opportunity to inspire more Europeans to be involved in self-development and will help partner institutions to raise and expand the level of activities.The project expects to achieve following results: the website with examples of good practices described, leaflets, presentations and videos created by adult learners, Moodle courses on the topic of art, films illustrating theatre workshops and learners work. Learners will prepare stories about their participation in project activities - these will be 'stories in multi-media' showing project impact on participants and their involvement.The Learning, Teaching or Training activities are integral to achievement of project objectives, results and outputs, and will lead to an improvement of linguistic, intercultural and communication skills.The project has dissemination plan is specifically designed to provide the best outreach results, comprising a precise timetable and framework description, core staffs and participants team and assignments, marketing and structured networking activities. General results of the project to be sustained by partners and disseminated within each country.By international project activities mutual understanding, empathy, positive change, and tolerance in European society will be promoted. Participants will gain new learning experiences during the project, as learning together creates opportunities. European cooperation will help to share knowledge and understand other cultures better. Learners' mobility and motivation will be enhanced. The project is also a way to combat prejudice, racism and xenophobia by raising awareness of a multi-cultural/multi-racial EU."

In many countries in the European Union, the structures and services that evaluate the needs and support those with mental health disabilities notice a particular difficulty with this population, especially with regards to finding them employment. The structures that support this specific population have to improve their skills and services in order to guarantee the quality of their guidance (especially considering the changing nature of mental health illnesses). This project will allow these structures, by exchanges of good practices between professionals, to meet the needs of people with mental health disabilities to get employment. This project concerns 2 specific target groups : social service providers supporting people with mental health disabilities to heir socio-professional inclusion, and people with mental health disabilities themselves who require more adapted and qualified support. The purpose of the partnership is to ensure that the skills of professionals/service providers for people with mental health disabilities match the developments in the sector. It will also contribute to the quality of social inclusion for this public. The aim of this partnership is to exchange the best practices in order ensure that service providers for people with mental health disabilities can improve theirs skills and provide quality and innovative support towards employment and meeting their specific needs. The project ABOVE partnership incorporates a very strong European dimension through the transnational cooperation of best practices, in order to improve the socio-professional remobilization of young people suffering from a mental health disability.

<< Background >>BACKGROUNDEurope and its member states are facing a disruptive asylum crisis. Not only adults and families with children try to reach Europe to start a better life. But also youngsters and even children arrive in Europe without the guidance of an adult. National authorities are extremely challenged on how these unaccompanied minor refugees (UMR) have to be taken care of, according national and international standards of child care and children's rights. UMR are often taken care of in the context of buddy projects or residential settings, where they are followed-up on an individual basis by a trustee that acts from a certain distance, or, in the context of a group that is guided by different rotating educators. Foster family care (not to be confused with adoption!) for UMR is a different and more recent trend in guiding this sub-group of ‘looked after youngsters’. All over Europe, 'normal' families are accepting a UMR as a 'normal' member of the family. Within this new trend of foster family care for UMR, foster care services are mentioning complexities and problematic situations that require a specialized guidance, taking into account exile-specific influences (f.e.: the effects of cumulative losses and life-threatening situations on the development of these youngsters), developmental phase-specificities (f.e.: multi-layered crises in identity formation), complex and multiple trauma-related dynamics (f.e.: the breakdown of the relationship with primary attachment figures and with later caretakers, a breakdown that can hinder the establishment of trust in the foster parents), and, migration-related factors (f.e.: being confronted with cultural differences). WHY WE APPLYFoster care services (all over Europe) report an enormous need to offer therapeutic – in the broadest sense of this word: ‘healing and development oriented’ - care for these youngsters and their foster families. (Therapeutic foster care is also often called ‘treatment foster care’). Foster care services also mention the need to share, within learning networks, about the difficulties these youngsters, their foster parents and the guidance networks are confronted with and about the tools and approaches they have at their disposal to work therapeutically with these families. In our project, we want to bring together knowledge and experiences in this context and we want (a) to work out a model - to be used by professional foster care workers - for the delivery of therapeutic care for this group of minor refugees and their foster families; a model that is based on research and that is very practice oriented), a model that can be shared with all foster care actors in the EU. (b) A training on this model, addressed to professional foster care workers, will also be produced. Furthermore, also (c) a 'knowledge base on research and best practices in the field of foster care for UMR' will be developed (an which the model and the training will be based on) and (d) 'policy and implementation recommendations' will be formulated.All partners in this project are engaged actors in the research, social care and foster care field, who want to contribute to essential actual societal challenges.<< Objectives >>For the foster care professionals: A knowledge base on research and best practices in the field of foster care for UMR, a training in exile-specific therapeutic foster care for foster families taking care of UMR (See the Project Results (PR), the training and multiplicator events that are listed up further), as well as an international learning network on evidence-based best practice in foster care for UMR. For the foster families and the UMR they are taking care of:A higher degree of mastery during the foster care period, better management of conflicts, stress and the effects of eventual trauma; better understanding and bridging of cultural sensitive barriers that have to do with exile-specific dynamics and cultural differences; better chances for social inclusion; more insight in the complex specificities of identity crises of UMR in adolescents that are additionally refugees); indirectly, a less frequent disabling of foster care situations. Via a better understanding of context and needs and via the targeted guidance model, the UMR will be better helped in the foster family context, at school and within society to become full and responsible member of the societyFor authorities and policy makers:Better foster family-based care solutions for UMR (outside large institutions), empowering the de-institutionalization strategy, more and better care in the foster care sector (professionalisation, international learning networks, and, the setting up of evidence based care), inclusion of UMR in society, tackling the effects and costs of multiple loss and broken-off primary attachment relationships or trauma of the UMR, as well as the and prevention of future drop out (to help the UMR in the foster family context, at school and within society becoming full and responsible member of the society), reducing the risk of break down in the foster families. The added values will be listed up in the Policy and implementation recommendations.<< Implementation >>1. Conducting a literature review on (a) research and (b) and on existing guidance practices in the context of foster care for families with UMR in European countries, as well as on (c) the needs and the difficulties that are reported by foster families with UMR and by the foster care professionals and the supportive networks that surround them. In Belgium, there are for example, the Mindspring® training programs and the First Steps preventive guidance method as valuable models for working with refugee families with children and youngsters in a foster family context. In Germany there is the Step-by-Step method of the Frankfurt Sigmund Freud Institute, in which – among many other aspects - potential candidates for foster parenting or for becoming a foster child are prepared for their complex challenge, in a preventive way. The experiences in Step-by-Step have influenced the Hesse Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration to set up several Psychosocial Networks of preventive and therapeutic Guidance Services for UMR. The abovementioned methods have in common that individual pathways or more group-oriented guidance initiatives approaches can be worked out: (a) on the individual level: supporting the needs of an individual foster family or foster child by a training, a psycho-educative initiative, a guidance or a psychotherapy for this specific child and his parents, (b) on the group-oriented level: group work with psycho-education or preventive guidance for a small group of foster parents or of foster children or youngsters, (c) on the level of guidance services: a learning network where information and practice experiences can be shared, supervision obtained and research results translated for guidance practice with UMR and their foster families. But the methods are not specifically adapted to foster care practice (and that will also be the case for other models that will be identified).One model that suits most for the purpose of therapeutic foster care for UMR will be selected. We will select out of the existing European practices those elements that provide answers to these complex challenges and we will integrate effective and promising practices within a model that suits most for the purpose of therapeutic foster care for UMR.2. Translating the identified effective and promising elements of UMR care into an exile-sensitive foster care model (taking into account the strengths, vulnerabilities and complexities within these foster families and their UMRs; special attention will be given to the developmental phase of adolescence as well as to the fact that the foster families can be kin or non- kin). This model will provide practice-oriented tools for the challenges of these foster families and will lead to a training program (with a manual) for the foster care professionals.3. Doing a pilot on the guidance model with 20 foster care families. The pilot will start with a training of the foster care professionals on the model that has been worked out. The experiences of the foster care services during the pilot phase will be systematically reported, in order to determine the weaknesses and the strengths of the guidance model. After the pilot phase, the necessary adjustments to the guidance model and the training program will be made. (A scheme to evaluate and to report the work done in the pilot phase and the effects of the model and the training will be developed).4. Policy and implementation recommendations on how to put the model and the training in practice will be developed. The recommendations will be addressed to foster care professionals, the management of foster care services, the regulating and funding authorities and the social policy levels at regional, national and European level.5. Dissemination of the outcomes of the literature and practice review, the guidance model, the training and the policy and implementation recommendations. This will be done at local, regional/national and European level.<< Results >>4 PROJECT RESULTS (PR) will be producedPR1: A literature review on research and on existing guidance practices in the context of foster care within the European member state countries PR2: Description of a model for therapeutic foster care workers (handbook, websiteP33: Training (handbook, website) on for therapeutic foster care workers PR4: policy and implementation recommendations 1 TRAINING EVENT (TE) will be set up as a trial of the developed model (PR2) and the training (PR3):TE1: training of foster care professionals of the 3 foster care partners (Rome)4 MULTIPLIER EVENTS (ME) will be organised as local dissemination activities (addressing local foster care actors in BE, IT and CY) and 1 international conference (BR)-ME1: Local ME Flanders (Gent) -ME2: Local ME Italy (Rome) -ME3: Local ME Cyprus (Nicosia)-ME4: Final conference (Brussels) 4 TRANSNATIONAL MEETINGS (TM) (and alternated with 3 or 4 online meetings) wil be set up for Steering group meetings and exchange between the project partnersTM1: launch meeting steering group (Ghent)TM2: Main aim: Presentation and feedback on model + training (Kassel)TM3: Main aim: Dissemination strategy (Nicosia)TM4: closing meeting steering group (Brussels)

<< Background >>Although a universal right, social inclusion and successful participation to society is a challenge for many citizens. This is the case, when people have to deal with hindering conditions, such as a disability. Especially, when this disability is characterised by cognitive impairments - as is true for people with an intellectual disability or an acquired brain injury - social inclusion is even more challenging. Adaptations of the environment to overcome the impairment to make society more accessible, is one important way to deal with the challenge. For people with sensory or motor impairments this is significantly contributing to their social inclusion. However, these environmental adaptations are not addressing - or only to a limited extent - the impairments that are the essence of intellectual disability or brain injury. For that reason, the approach to adapt society to the disability is completed with a complementary approach of empowering the person with a disability, to equip the person with skills and attitudes that enable the person to adapt to the environment and to society. This is important for all people with or without a disability, but it is in particular a main challenge for people with a cognitive disability. The reason is that an intellectual disability, according to the general accepted definitions of WHO or AAID, refers to a low IQ, but also to inadequate developed adaptive skills. The same phenomenon is seen in brain injury. People with these impairments show a lack of problem solving skills, flexibility, planning behavior,... all skills that are critical for being able to adapt to society, to deal with unforeseen circumstances, problems and changes. These skills, often summarized as transversal skills, are key for successful social inclusion and participation. For that reason the EU Skills Agenda (2016, 2020) and the “Union of Equality: strategy for the rights of persons with a disability 2021-2030” (March 2021) identify the need to address these skills among all citizens, in particular among people with disabilities.Adult educators, and by extension many professionals working with people with cognitive impairments in the field of disability, observe that the efforts to teach these transversal skills, have no long term effects and are not transferred to everyday life. This may not be surprising, as the same transversal skills are skills that are critical for the cognitive process of transfer. Research confirms this observation, but - at the same time - defines suggestions and methodologies to improve the acquisition of transversal skills and the transfer of these skills to everyday life, contributing in this way to successful social inclusion. Adult educators express the need to develop competences for successful transversal skills training and for ‘training for transfer’ of these skills. Including effective educational strategies (explicit goals on transfer, cognitive methodologies and tools for training and for transfer) will not only promote self-efficacy of the adult educators but also - at the end - social inclusion of people with a cognitive disability.<< Objectives >>The main objective of TETRA-S is to improve the competences of the adult educators 1. in teaching people with a cognitive disability transversal skills - that are critical for successful social inclusion - in an efficient and effective way and 2. to enhance the transfer of these skills in the everyday life of the learners.Several challenges need to be addressed to realise this general objective. Therefor, the general objective of TETRA-S is supported by subgoals:- to change hindering beliefs of adult educators on the learning potential of the learners and to reduce resistance and inertia towards the effective adoption and application of the appropriate (digital and non-digital) tools-to improve competences to create a powerful learning environment for teaching transversal skills, tailored to the needs of people with a cognitive disability as a prerequisite for an adequate learning process-to improve competences to create conditions and apply techniques for training of transfer, such as metacognitive reflections<< Implementation >>TETRA-S main activities are related to the development of innovative tools that contribute to the improvement of the competences of adult educators: a set of educational frameworks, self-assesment apps, webinars and handbooks will be produced and integrated into a validated interactive E-learning platform (MOOC). International meetings of the partnership during the project lifetime are intended to monitor the progress, to take well considered decisions on the content of the tools and to coordinate the development of the complete set to ensure coherence. A general management plan will support the activities and production of the project results, ensuring a qualitative outcome. A dissemination and impact strategy plan will contribute to a maximum impact of the project.Each partner establishes an internal project working group and a Local Expert Group, serving as a focus group, giving input and feedback on what is produced, to ensure that the project results really meet the needs of the adult educators and contribute to the social inclusion of the people with a cognitive disability.A training activity on the state of the art of transfer will be organised to share knowlege and experiences with adult educators and to receive input for the development of the aforementioned set of tools.The project will be closed with an international multiplier event to present the outcomes and to invite stakeholders to implement the tools.<< Results >>The outcome of the project will be available as an interactive MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), including an eLearning Management System (LMS) that will host all training/learning content and the developed webinars and apps. An interactive digital simulation environment will be provided through the LMS.The application provides not only the adult educators of the partner organisations and the local expert groups a validated MOOC as tool to improve competences to promote social inclusion of people with a disability but at the same time it offers a tool to the complete field of disability to promote social inclusion.

TALES@home (Talking About Language and EmotionS at home). This project aims to empower multilingual families in their language management at home. With reference to this management the focus is on language attitudes and emotions and this for two main reasons:- Multilingual families play a significant and important role in the language learning of the family members and this for all languages concerned (minority languages, heritage languages, languages of integration). Attitudes and emotions influence motivation and the learning of these languages.- Language use in the multilingual family influences the wellbeing of the family members. Multilingual families should be supported to create an optimal environment for language learning and wellbeing. They should create an open atmosphere in which decisions on language maintenance /shift are considered and debatable. They should reinforce the mutual understanding between different generations and a positive approach to language learning. They should be able to handle negative attitudes and reinforce the positive ones. This is a family matter for each multilingual family. Professionals (educators, social/medical workers, teachers etc.) working with multilingual families are confronted with family members who sometimes struggle with the multilingual context that they are living in or who express negative connotations towards the home language and/or language of integration. The negative attitudes influence their wellbeing and/or language learning. These professionals need tools to help clients to express the attitudes and bend them in a more positive direction and this supported by the family. The central tool is an interactive application. The tool provides the possibility to the family members (from 6 years on) to input their emotions and ideas concerning the languages' use at home. We provided different activities. Family members can create their language portraits and they can visualize their language competences on a ladder. They can measure their ‘temperature’ (cold/warm feelings) for different language situations at home such as dinner, discussions, visits etc. They can tell something about important (cultural) references in their lives and draw a timeline of their process of migration and language learning. Professionals introduce the use of the tool in the family and support the communication about the outcome. To support the correct use of the app a user guide (in six languages) and short film are provided. In line with this, a training course for professionals is available in online talks about different subjects: they provide background information, an overview of the research done in this project and a presentation of the tool.This project was taken up by 7 Partners. Soros International House (Vilnius, Lithuania), EURAC Bolzano (Bolzano, Italy), UNIPA (Palermo, Italy), Double Helix Resourses (London, England), Foyer vzw (Brussels, Belgium) provided the theoretical background and elaborated the constant involvement of the stakeholders from first questioning until finalizing the development of the tool. Howest, Department Devine-Digital Design & Development (Kortrijk, Brussels) was responsible for the design and development of the tool and lead the other partners through the methodology of User-Centered-Design. ENSA-network (Brussels, Belgium) sustained the dissemination.To develop this app the chosen approach was “User Centred Design”; this means that the stakeholders (families and professionals) were strongly involved in the process of development.During the process we could observe the impact of this approach on different levels. For the multilingual families: It was remarkable that often parents discovered aspects about themselves and/or the children they didn't realize before. They understood quite fast the importance of working on positive approaches of mother tongues and languages of integration. It had an empowering effect: it was something they could do! So it was possible to see the impact immediately. In this stage (with the tool only recently available), we cannot be sure if it was long-term impact or short-term. A long time use can make this clear. For the professionals: They became more aware of the impact of language attitudes on learning and well being. They became more aware of the importance to take these issues up with their students of clients. For our organizations: It gave us the opportunity to exchange experiences in different language contexts.All materials are freely accessible to the users on the project website www.talesathome.eu.