ARTEM

ARTEM is a long-term strategic project whose main objective is the development of an interactive space between people born in Europe and people with a migrant background, to create jobs based on a dynamic mutual process. This project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission and coordinated by the French organization Pistes Solidaires, is participated by eight European partners and offers a series of activities over its two-year duration.​

The Project

Since 2004, the Council of the European Union has agreed on a series of common basic principles for the integration of migrants in the European coutries. The ARTEM project aims to develop an interactive space between people born in Europe and people coming form outside Europe, to create jobs based in a non-commercial service exchange system that will be found on the ARTEM ACCESS online platform.

Furthermore, the objectives of ARTEM are based on the values ​​of integration of migrants within the European local communities, the promotion of mutual knowledge between countries and in the skills for professionals and local volunteers to offer international knowledge, approaches, positions and attitudes that combine the approaches of migrants and locals. It is aiming to build a shared learning through a conscious exchange and the concept of "learning by doing", with the final goal of creating employment opportunities for migrants, recognizing their skills and knowledge, overcoming fears and stereotypes that nowadays can be found in this field, and, of course, on the basis that migrants are at the same level as any other person born in Europe.

This project is coordinated by the French organization Pistes Solidaires (Francia) and counts on the following partners: Replay Network (Italy), Catro (Bulgaria), Acorderie Pau Bearn (France), Verein Multikulturell (Austria), Asociación Mundus (Spain), PINA (Slovenia) and Videnscenter for Integration (Denmark).

Context

The inclusion of non-native migrants of European Union in European local communities is an increasingly important issue, considering the increasing migratory flow. The European Commission has made a priority of it since 1999 and put it on the agenda of the European Council of Tempere.

In 2004, the Council of the European Union agreed on a set of common basic principles for the integration of migrants. These give a preponderant role to the interaction between migrants and European locals, with a constant: integration, as the first of these principles, can only work if it is the result of a mutual dynamic process. This process implies a basic knowledge of the language, history and the structure of the host countries.

Goals

The general objective of the project is to promote and raise awareness about the ARTEM project itself and provide information on its results, transfer the results to gain sustainable promotion and support, and expand the model as much as possible, even after the project.

In particular, the specific objectives of the project are:

• To make an inventory of the training necessities of the people who receive the newly arrived migrants, especially in intercultural matters.
• To develop a full training process for local communities and recently arrived migrants to contribute to a better social (and professional) integration, in the form of a "focus group", which will allow us to know the state of the art, the skills and participants' exeperiences.
• To develop a training tool for migrants through stories with digital cartography, a process called "digital story mapping", to improve the recognition of their own "ARTEM" (talent, knowledge, skills, experiences...). This specific tool will be the one that will guide the final goal of the project, the digital platform itself.
• To establish a multilingual exchange platform for putting local communities and migrants into contact, around the specific learning experiences based on skills and knowledge.

Project activities

This project has the following actions:

• Focus groups: To establish the state of the art in this field in each country and gather experiences, initiatives and needs for the training. Beyond helping to better understand the issues that are essential for the project, the main reason for this action is to identify the needs in terms of training and the difficulties that we may encounter. Therefore, an investigation, a meeting with local partners and focus groups will be carried out with the newly arrived migrants of the local communities. Each partner will hold a focus group of workers and volunteers, and two others with migrants.
• Story mapping: To implement the work of storytelling through the digital cartography with a training about "mapping" of stories. The objectives of this training are to fight against withdrawal, to facilitate the communication process and break the stereotypes that surround migrants. This action ends in the creation of the content of the training that will take place at the local level, organizing in each country two formations of two weeks with at least ten migrants.
• ARTEM Trainings: Two intercultural trainings will be carried out: one for the newly arrived migrant’s groups and one for local staff involved in the process of welcoming them. The first onemaims to develop communication skills to foster interculturality; the second one aims to overcome stereotypes, to foster respect among different cultures and to diversity into value in the local context.
• ARTEM Access: A service exchange platform will be set up with technical standards and specific contents according to the objectives of the project. It will be a multilingual web platform that gathers all the productions of the project and that allows the exchange of services between the partner countries of the project.
• Policy paper: A document will be created to influence the procedures that are connected with the reception of migrants and their integration into European labor markets, in addition to serving as a support for the dissemination of the ARTEM project itself.

To carry out these actions, the following activities have been planned:

1. Initial meeting of partners in Pau (France), to establish the status of the issue in each country and draw project’s lines
2. Transnational meeting of partners in Vejl (Denmark), to validate the evaluation plan and the dissemination plan, and to prepare the action plan on training and mobility of students.
3. Learning mobility in Italy to explain how the ARTEM ACCESS platform works.
4. Meeting of partners in Sofia (Bulgaria), to review the results and the first year of the project and to prepare the relevant documentation.
5. Meeting of partners in Barcelona (Spain) to evaluate the entire project, measure its impact and its degree of sustainability and prepare the final report and the policy document about the outlines of the project.

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.​

Related news

The results of the ARTEM focus groups published

Training of the ARTEM project in Pau (France)