ERASMI will enable the diverse stakeholder groups in the field of migration and refugee inclusion work (amongst them e.g. community administration, public and private migrant support organisations, NGOs, VET, HEI, business organisations, volunteer groups etc.) to professionalise their staff and their organisations in order to effectuate their impact on social inclusion and will empower them to build strong multi-actor networks developing and implementing regional action plans for social inclusion of migrants and refugees.

Building on the framework of EU-Policies and the European Agenda on Migration, the actual inclusion work is a regional social task, that cannot be a single player tournament for administration and politics. It needs to be challenged involving all relevant regional stakeholders and actors. In fact it is a regional, cross-sectional, multidimensional and multi-actor challenge – with an extraordinary high level of complexity.

Municipalities already understand this and react with strategic approaches towards social inclusion. But aspiration differs from reality in a dramatic way. Yet despite the willingness of communities, a recent study reveals that innovative participation concepts and multi-stakeholder-approaches are still the exception rather than the rule (Success factors of Integration on municipal level – Friedrich Ebert Stiftung 2017).

To remedy this, Erasmi will enable the diverse stakeholder groups in the field of migration and refugee inclusion work to professionalise their staff and their organisations in order to effectuate their impact on social inclusion and will empower them to build strong multi-actor networks developing and implementing regional action plans for social inclusion of migrants and refugees.

We will respond to the needs by pursuing the following objectives;

  • Provide actors with best practice (collaboration) blueprints in the field of multi-actor migrants and refugee inclusion (IO1
  • Develop an innovative learning framework and toolkit (IO2) empowering actors to enhance the impact of their social work.
  • Enable and empower actors to improve collaborative planning and coordination of education activities in Interagency Networks with regional action plans for social inclusion (IO3)
  • To ensure wide and free access, the framework and the documented processes and lessons learned from the networks will be shared on our interactive knowledge exchange platform as OERs (IO4)

On completion the project will make a notable contribution to improve the inclusion of the most vulnerable in society. Erasmi is important because we need to ensure communities are strengthened by migration and not undermined by marginalization or radicalization. We believe this can be achieved best, through empowering those who already understand this importance and by building strong networks.