ESU’s small grants programme for inclusion, moving forward
BRUSSELS, 23 April 2019 – The European Students’ Union (ESU) programme called ‘Together, Moving Forward’ has been shortlisted for the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outreach. The project -now in its 2nd edition- is expanding and is planning to launch a ‘Best Practices Handbook’
‘Together, Moving Forward’ (TMF) started in 2016 as a small grants programme supporting projects led by refugee and non-refugee student organisations across Europe working on inclusion of young refugees in education and society. Through the programme, ESU did not only (co-)fund projects but took an active role in providing guidelines, advice and valuable feedback especially to those that were ‘first-time’ coordinators and drivers of such initiatives.
At the present moment, the programme has given support to 33 projects and it keeps adding more initiatives to the list (a new selection of projects is ongoing and the results will be announced at the end of the month).
Recently, ESU received a very special notification announcing that TMF had been shortlisted for the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outreach, a contest run by the European Commission and whose edition this year focuses on young people. The winners will be revealed during the Award Ceremony on the 29th April 2019.
‘The most important motivator is actually seeing those local initiatives being developed, listening to the stories the grantees tell us along the way and being able to see the final impact; it is encouraging to see how small actions can actually change some people’s lives and open perspectives toward more inclusive and welcoming societies’ says Fanchon Lefevre, project manager of TMF and the main contact point for the grantees.
The next steps for the upcoming months are the promotion of the local initiatives participating in the programme -giving them more visibility- and the production of the publication ‘Together, Moving Forward – Good practices and Recommendations handbook’ with the aim to inspire and give recommendations to future initiatives working with the same issues.
For the second activity, TMF has launched a call for participants to join a Task Force dedicated to gather and analyse concrete good practices and key learning points based on the different activities of the programme (projects, activity reports, capacity building seminars, among others).
The ideal candidates should have some knowledge and/or experience working on inclusion and migration issues and/or be a student or a young individual with a refugee or migrant background. The members of the Task Force will be expected to work throughout April-December 2019.
More information about the Call for members of the Task Force can be found here.
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Note to editors:
Together Moving Forward is a small grants programme run by ESU aiming at building positive refugee-host interactions across Europe. With this programme, ESU is calling upon university students and refugees to work together and get the system “unstuck”.
The Altiero Spinelli Prize is an initiative implemented by the European Commission at the request of the European Parliament, which is funding the prize as a Pilot Project. The 2018 edition of the Spinelli Prize focuses on projects addressed to young people. The Award Ceremony will be held in Brussels on the 29th of April 2019.
The European Students’ Union is the umbrella organisation of 45 National Unions of Students (NUS) from 39 countries. The aim of ESU is to represent and promote the educational, social, economic and cultural interests of students at the European level towards all relevant bodies and in particular the European Union, Bologna Follow Up Group, Council of Europe and UNESCO. Through its members, ESU represents around 15 million students in Europe.
For more information, please contact: Fanchon Lefevre, Project Manager, European Students’ Union, movingforward@esu-online.org or call +32 2 893 25 48 during working hours
Marta Nunez, Communications Manager, European Students’ Union, marta.nunez@esu-online.org
