This mobility project was financed by the European Commission through the Erasmus + programme and focused on good practice exchanges in the field of intercultural mediation. The aim of the project was to support the process of migrant integration in Romania. This was achieved by developing the competences and capacity of the national network of intercultural mediators, created four years before, together with a team of trainers in adult education. Thus, at the end of 2015 (November-December), a team of 20 people – mediators and trainers – were involved in a 5 day mobility in Imola, Italy, to take part in a course on the topic of intercultural mediation and visit several organizations in the area, active in the field of migrant integration.
The activity aimed to develop several competences of the 20 participants:
The project continued in 2016, when the mobility participants organized local dissemination meetings in Timisoara, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi and Constanta. These meetings were aimed at sharing the knowledge acquired within the intercultural mediation training course with other stakeholders interested in migrant integration (migrants, migrant organizations, public institutions or NGOs) and promoting the Intercultural Cities Programme and starting an analysis of their own cities seen through the intercultural lenses.
As a result of keeping the network of intercultural mediators active in Romania and developing it professionally, which was accomplished through this project, several mediators were contacted and employed by other NGOs implementing migrant integration projects, which contributes, in the medium and long term, both to the network’s sustainability and to the fluidization of the migrant integration process and the continuation of the consultation activities supported by our organization in recent years.