Spreading Community Life Model: Good practices Exchange in the field of Community Life and Housing for Social Excluded People Erasmus Project

Project Title

Spreading Community Life Model: Good practices Exchange in the field of Community Life and Housing for Social Excluded People

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Access for disadvantaged

Project Summary

In Europe, more than 120 million people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. One of Europe 2020 strategy is to reduce this number of 20 million people.
For a sustainable and inclusive fight against poverty, we need to work at a European Level. This partnership strongly believes in the Social Investment Package strategy, promoted by the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion:
Social investment means policies designed to strengthen people’s skills and capacities and support them in the key areas included in this partnership.

We believe that such a goal could be reached only using a transnational approach: different ways to live in a community should be compared in order to realize what are the strong points and the weak ones of each community, different countries have different traditions and different methodologies: Exchanging good practices in this field can improve the way every community face its own internal problems daily.
Another aspect is that, often among the community population, the presence of immigrants is very high, so the added value to work at a transnational level is to learn and raise the comprehension of other cultures. These are the reasons why we carried out this project at a transnational level.

This project main objective was to exchange good practices in the field of Community Life and Housing. For that, we carefully selected partners who are an example of what we mean when we talk about “Community Life”. In total 5 partners: FES, the coordinator, a community housing people at risk of social exclusion which bases its work on a self-management model. Artemide is a social cooperative mainly deals with abused mothers and their children who have been abused or who are at risk of being abused. That is why this organization can boast a big experience in this field; this experience and its competences can be spread among other communities. The Bulgarian partner is a non-profit organization which uses values as “eco-sustainability” and “care to the natural environment” as educational tools, useful at the moment of creating a strong and stable community life model. The Albanian Organization of Orden of Malta is a association dealing mainly with Roma communities and Egyptian one. Its main field of action is health care and prevention of sexual diseases with women at risk. Its work in this specific field could be an important example to other communities hosting women coming from different social and cultural background. And the Mary Seacole Housing Association is a community whose aim is to house homeless single people, with the main goal to help them in passing from a state of dependency to a one of independency.

Throughout the exchange of good practices, we were looking for spread “community life” models, improving all aspects that can be enhanced in regard to: Community building, Education, Training and Employability, Eco-Sustainability and Housing, giving to professionals dealing with all related issues new and strong competencies in order to raise their capacity in managing Community sustainable models and help people at risk of social exclusion in getting a higher social welfare level.

During the first year in the development of the project, throughout the study visits, we could exchange good practices. Adopting new methods and improving the good practices and programmes already in use giving to our professional’s more effective tools.

After the analysis of study cases, at the beginning of the second year of the project, technical experts of the project who participated in Study Visits have elaborated a Tool Box, containing transferable good practices selected during the study visits. This will help in the development of a public web platform to be considered as an important tool for all those professionals working in this field. We’d want this Platform to be an open space for all European Communities working with socially excluded people in order to share their projects and good practices in the web and help professionals all around Europe to get a deep vision on key effective activities in community work.

During the 6 last months of the project, the activity was based on strong dissemination and organization at local/regional/national level of stakeholders roundtable about project aims and about spreading of Community new models learned. During this year the partner also worked on the website and Web Platform developing a community map of their country focusing on at least 10 communities for socially excluded people. This second year of project, the aim was to demonstrate the added value and evidence of transnationally explored bottom up activities and to facilitate the streamlining of the lessons learned from these methods and initiatives to European and national private and public bodies for a better governance about Community Life for Socially Excluded persons in order to better the deal between public services and third sector.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 151822 Eur

Project Coordinator

Fundación Escuela de Solidaridad & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Sdruzhenie “Ekologichno Sdruzhenie Predbalkan”/772/2003
• Mary Seacole Housing Association
• Cooperativa Sociale Artemide
• Organizata Shqiptare e Urdhrit te Maltes
• Housing Center – Housing Development Center for Socially Vulnerable Groups