Distress Flare (FDD) is a European cooperation project operating in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and France. Its aim is to unite, compare and contrast the various skills and experiences had by citizens, researchers, artists and local public decision-makers working to counter migrants’ social exclusion.Europe has recently experienced one of its sharpest ever rises of its history in migrant people numbers. The issue of welcoming these migrant people is gaining greater traction in both EU-wide and local debates going so far as to severely divide populations. Populist ideologies often capitalise on a fear of foreigners, and their rise runs counter to ambitions to consolidate Europe as a space for peace, while also driving a wedge between citizens and institutions.Given the urgent need to rebuild a culture of solidarity that can overcome nationalist narratives, eleven organisations from six countries are banding together their skills, their capacity for innovation and their networks to honour the contribution and role of migrants in Europe today. Our objectives:- To contribute to migrants’ social inclusion and help them actively participate in democratic life. We will do this by strengthening migrants’ ability to express themselves publically as they acquire new interpersonal and intercultural skills.- To empower migrants and non-migrants to work towards a more creative Europe with a greater sense of solidarity. - To support the design, implementation and dissemination of innovative teaching methods through a combination of the eleven partners’ pedagogical, social, artistic and academic skills.- To promote and apply the idea of cultural rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fribourg Declaration.Over a three-year period, the project multidisciplinary consortium will work to create several multilingual resources, including handbooks for all participants, a reference material kit, a website, a scientific and educational publication, a manifesto and a documentary film series.To do this, in each countries of the project, from 2019 to 2021, we will organise six training sessions, each one due to run over seven consecutive days comprised of :- an educational artistic workshop in which adults and young migrants and non-migrants, ultimately will display their work in public;- a communications kit workshop, in which a group of students from a university or specialist college will roll out our communications in public spaces;- an action-research organised by humanities researchers, with a focus on the methodological innovations designed over the course of the project;- a plenary seminar for all stakeholders.The project’s third year will be spent finalising intellectual outputs and spreading the word about them locally and internationally. A training day for public decision-makers will bring the project to a close in June 2022 and lend it a global impact.We expect the project’s medium-term impacts to be the following:- A revitalised sense of citizenship from a local level upwards, as people are encouraged to take part in democratic life and engage with EU-wide social issues such as the challenges of immigration.- Greater legitimacy will be given to innovative learning promoting multidisciplinary skills.- Greater learning opportunities in Europe to support the education and training sector. These opportunities will emerge out of newly created and promoted multilingual open educational resources coproduced with project stakeholders. These attractive, high-quality OERs will be available online.- Sustainable transnational cooperative networks will be set up between universities and people from outside academia. - Partners will have more scope for working internationally and trialling new methodologies.- Participants, public decision-makers and partner organisations will become more conscious of their ties to our European community’s shared future.- New educational synergies will be developed between cities: training for public decision-makers is designed to be replicable, and its aim is to formulate public policy in which intercultural dialogue and citizen participation are encouraged.The FDD project’s primary audience is adults and young migrants and non-migrants who will take part in educational artistic workshops. FDD also aims to train professionals from all different backgrounds—including teachers, academics and public decision-makers—so that we can pass on the OERs to a wider student audience and facilitate better awareness and understanding of how migration has historically shaped modern-day Europe. The project has the capacity to get 3,600 people directly involved, and its outcomes will be communicated to more than 60,000 people.