Reaching Refugee Youth in Greece through Emergence Foundation
In July 2021, Amala teamed up with UK-based educational charity and grant-giving organisation, Emergence Foundation, to launch a new project enabling displaced youth in Greece to access transformational learning. Through building partnerships with organisations in Greece (Hellenic Red Cross Volos & Kalavryta, Action for Education Chios, Danish Refugee Council Athens, Medical Intervention (Medin), ECHO HUB Athens & more) the project aimed to support educators of partner organisations to develop their competencies as facilitators and implement Amala Changemaker Courses for displaced learners in their communities. One year on, Amala has trained 46 facilitators from 15 organisations in Greece who have gone on to facilitate agency-based learning at different corners of the country.
“The most important thing from this course was the opportunity to work as part of a team and to exchange ideas and share my philosophy with others.”
Background to the project
Amala has been working in Greece since 2017 to run Changemaker Courses such as Peacebuilding in your Community & Social Entrepreneurship. While many of these courses are delivered directly by Amala teams in Athens and Thessaloniki, we also work with partners who share in our mission to bring transformational education to refugee youth in the country. Working with partners has been a key feature of being able to bring Amala programmes beyond the big cities, to learners who we would otherwise be unable to reach.
In 2021, Amala collaborated with the Special Secretariat for the Protection of Unaccompanied Minors on a project to support capacity building of educators working with unaccompanied minors around Greece. Through this collaboration, we saw the need for experiential learning tools and training on how to use them for many educators working both with unaccompanied minors and with displaced communities more broadly. This inspired us to think of how we might continue to offer our facilitator training and support to educators in more rural areas and complement it with the opportunity to facilitate Amala programmes for learners who would not typically be able to participate in our classes in Athens. Thanks to funding support from the Emergence Foundation, we were able to make these ideas a reality.
Delivering Amala Facilitator Training; impact on educators
For this project, we wanted to proactively reach educators in different areas in Greece. Through our training and ongoing support, these educators would then be able to successfully bring Amala Changemaker Courses to the communities they work with, enabling young, displaced learners to develop their agency for positive change. Quarterly training sessions were led by our Greece Programme Coordinator, Elissavet, with the aim of building educators’ capacity and skills to facilitate transformational, agency-based learning both in the context of Amala courses and beyond. Training topics included creating inclusive classrooms, contextualising the curriculum and course planning and delivery.
These trainings had an impact on facilitators even in cases where resource restrictions or COVID-19 complications did not allow partners to go ahead with course implementation. One facilitator said “the training gave me a boost for creativity” and suggested that all educators, particularly those with less experience, would benefit from participating in such a training as often as once a month. She also highlighted that the exchange and interaction with other educators from a number of organisations working in Greece during the training was extremely valuable. Moreover, we found that the training sparked better engagement within organisations; “it has also had an impact that everyone felt; all colleagues and students feel like this was a nice project that enabled students to discuss current issues.”
This project further excelled in combining the expertise of local partner organisations in their communities with Amala’s approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. During the training, emphasis was placed on educators' own experience and ability to contextualise and adapt the curriculum to better support the students in their context. Educators have also been able to develop competencies that can enhance their work in the community beyond this project. 81.8% of those who participated said that they have continued to use the skills and competencies they developed through this programme in their work more broadly. In her 6-month interview, one facilitator said: “I also realised how discussions and reflection can be a very supportive tool to encourage sharing and connection. I used to think for example that a video could offer answers and insights. However, I realised how the reflection questions were so important and they brought up a lot more questions. It was insightful to see how this reflection offered such insights and was so engaging for the students.”
Peacebuilding courses; the impact on students
Six of our partners who participated in the training chose to run our Peacebuilding in your Community course for refugee and displaced youth in their context.
Feedback from students across the different locations has been positive with students acknowledging how the course made them feel clamber and able to resolve conflicts with their peers and in their communities. One student shared; “It's been great so far, I feel I have gained some new skills such as, making the first step toward peace in all kinds of conflict zones, communication, conflict analysis, active listening, managing team and projects, and approach to do some research on developing peace in the communities.”
Students also commented on how the course was “an opportunity to work as part of a team and to exchange ideas and share my philosophy with others”. At the end of the Peacebuilding course, students are invited to present on a peacebuilding project that they have developed in groups throughout the course. These projects are a result of the work students have done to identify barriers to peace in their communities and the tools they have created to address them using conflict analysis and conflict transformation tools : “The fact that we built a unique tool that was helpful for a community was something really exciting for me”.
One student, Alind, who participated in the Peacebuilding course run by InterEuropean Human Aid Association (IHA), in Lagadikia, chose the medium of film for his project to explore the question ‘What does the word refugee mean?’. In his video he shares the different perspectives and opinions offered by his peers and volunteers working with IHA. Watch it below. Other students focused on debunking myths around refugees and asylum seekers in Greece through projects such as Is seeking asylum easy?, Do refugees increase crime rates? and Do refugees steal jobs?
“The course helped me by developing a sense of belonging. I learned many new things, about stereotypes and how important one story is.”
For other students, the courses were a way to come together with likeminded people and share experiences; “the course was really helpful because it made me understand that all people are equal, with different experiences and knowledge, something important for a community.” Facilitators that we worked with also noted the impact that these courses had on this particular group of refugee youth, who have rare opportunities to continue their learning or access curriculum that is tailored to them. One facilitator said “This course has helped them [students] realise that no matter where you are and no matter the hardships you face, if you work towards what you want, you will be rewarded. This is important for those students because they have experienced great disappointment and disenfranchisement, and so setting goals, working towards them and being rewarded is very important in terms of reengaging them, motivating and mobilising them. The experience they have at schools, for instance, is very bad and discourages them. The process of this course was crucial in this context.”
Key learnings: the importance of long-term partnerships
The importance of building long-term partnerships has been one of the key learnings from this project. Long-term partnerships have enabled us to reach more refugee youth in different areas in Greece and make Amala learning and pedagogical tools accessible to other educators in the field. This has helped us work towards greater systemic change by supporting educators in Greece to embed transformational learning approaches into their practice. We, too, have learned from our partners and have better understood existing challenges in the Greek context, particularly in relation to resources, competing priorities and the lack of stability of living conditions of learners that interrupt the educational process. Through this new community of Amala partners and facilitators, we are excited to l continue to work together and facilitate peer sharing and support to be able to run more Amala courses for refugee learners all over Greece.
About Emergence Foundation
Emergence Foundation aims to support organisations, charities, social enterprises and projects that are engaged in and committed to the uplift of individuals, organisations and culture at large: projects that affect a shift in consciousness and perspective based on the fundamental unity of all life, providing a force of positive change in the world.
Emergence Foundation has also supported our work in Greece in 2019, enabling us to bring two Amala Changemaker Courses in "Peacebuilding in your Community" and "English for Changemakers" to displaced learners in Athens.
List of partners involved in this project
International Rescue Committee
