Digitalising a network for peer collaboration and learning in family and community resources for workers in the social, educational and mental health sectors Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digitalising a network for peer collaboration and learning in family and community resources for workers in the social, educational and mental health sectors

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social dialogue; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

An important number of people who ask for assistance in social and mental health sectors are defined as groups with fewer opportunities and often their children present educational difficulties.The fact that people with fewer opportunities are in higher risk of social exclusion makes our efforts to bring social interventions closer to the community (and so less individualistic) a crucial matter nowadays.

This project seeks to contribute to enhance and spread family and community resources in institutions working in social, educational and mental health sectors in order to improve their work, to allow them to reach more users in less time and to give to these users and their families a more efficient and high quality intervention. Our partnership focuses on building up a strong transnational network where community and family resources in social, educational and mental health are discussed and shared through a digital platform. The target group of this project are professionals in need of more family and community tools to work with the ultimate target group: socially disadvantaged people and/or people suffering from mental health problems.

In this project, each institution is both willing to share their work as well as learning from other institutions, in order to achieve the following objectives:
– To improve achievement in work with community and family resources within partner institutions.
– To spread new competences in community and family resources and to give to its participants a theoretical and practical knowledge.
– To enhance skills in community and family resources for both professionals and students’ practice.
– To offer high quality learning opportunities to workers of partner institutions.

In this project, each partner institution will welcome 6 professionals from any of the partner institutions along the 2 years of project. The participant will be chosen in their own institutions based on their interest and possibility to apply innovative ways of working in their field and their abilities to convey new information to the rest of his/her working team. They will choose their destination based on their interest in the different approaches offered by partners institutions and its feasibility to apply it in their own institutions. Participants will learn and share different ways of approaching community and family work. During these 5 days, different teaching activities will be carried out, such as cooperative work, acquisition of formal knowledge, visiting innovative structures from the local network, interfamily group sessions, etc. These professionals will introduce what they have learned during this week to their own teams back home and will introduce what they have learnt and how this interacts with their previous way of working in the digital platform.

Along the duration of the project, the following products will be delivered:
– A state of art of previous experiences in community and family resources in social, educational and mental health sectors will be done at the beginning of the project in order to contextualize it in the current scenario.
– A digital platform will be created in order to share, spread and discuss interventions in community and family resources, strengthening a professional network around these issues.
– A manual or book guiding the implementation and use of community and family resources in social, educational and mental health sectors. Strong guidelines are devised in order to consolidate this professional network in the future.
– Short-term training events will help professionals to acquire a higher knowledge in techniques that deal with efficiency and high quality work in community and family resources. These experiences will be materialized in short essays after each training event.
– An assessment report of the project that will delimit the strengths and the weaknesses with a synthesis of the expertise and a description of the specific skills.
– An evaluation of the programme and approach to results is performed.

This project aims to ground to earth the directions of EU, such as the one stated in the Lisbon strategy regarding the achievement of social cohesion (Rodrigues, 2009). As professionals working in social, educational and mental health sectors, if there is a need to support this cohesion among marginalized users and families, we have to start by ourselves, strengthening cooperation among professionals and among European institutions and by enhancing the development of innovative methods.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 162650,94 Eur

Project Coordinator

Centre de Terapia Interfamiliar S.L. & Country: ES

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITATEA AUREL VLAICU DIN ARAD
• Center for Mental and Pedagogical Support
• The International Attachment Network
• Centre Neuro Psychiatrique Saint-Martin
• Kirkkopalvelut ry
• LUXEMBOURG INSTITUTE OF HEALTH
• Sjúkrahusid a Akureyri