The project 'Integration through education' answers for the refugee crisis which started in the beginning of last year. More than 350,000 migrants were detected at the EU's borders in January-August 2015, compared with 280,000 detections for the whole of 2014. That 350,000 figure - an estimate from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) - does not include the many who got in undetected. UE leaders as well as national leaders of each UE member's countries are searching the way to solve this situation. In the European and national level they share refugees between all countries, improve procedures to claim asylum, stranger the borders. In the same time in almost all European countries people demonstrate against this decisions and against arriving of refugees. The European society is not prepare for a changes connected with globalization. There is not enough information about immigrants and refugees, their situation. There is no educational materials about this topic, which could be used by youth workers for workshop and another activities. The aim of the project is to create web platform with educational materials for people working with youth, especially with immigrants and refugees with open access to them, allowing them to put these topics in provided educational and integration activities. This is only way to build societies integrating immigrants and refugees, not their marginalization. The target group of the project are people working with youth, especially with immigrants and refugees in schools, universities, NGOs, community centers, libraries. On the one hand, these are people experienced in working with young people, but not always in working with immigrants and refugees. They lack the knowledge and tools to carry out high-quality educational and integration workshops and events. The second target group are young people, including immigrants and refugees who, without adequate support are at risk of social exclusion: marginalization, unemployment, falling out of the education system.The main outcome of the project will be a web platform with educational materials for those working with young people, mainly with immigrants and refugees. The project 'Integration through education' will contribute to increase the competence of youth workers, including immigrants and refugees who receive new tools to work in the form of educational materials. At the local level this will increase the number of its activities, and improve their quality. Will also increase the number of people with knowledge and skills to work with immigrants and refugees. This in turn will contribute to improving the situation of migrants and refugees, as well as to ease tensions and social conflicts through the integration activities.

Within the Tourism sector, which employs over 12 million people, many employees and especially young people, work on short term contracts and follow a pattern of intense high season activity followed by low season unemployment. The issue of seasonality in tourism has long been a source of concern expressed in EU publications and it is feared that the intense concentration of touristic activities in a relatively short period of time “may have dramatic negative impact on local economies for the whole year” (Ecorys Study in support of policy measures for maritime and coastal tourism, 2013). This is particularly true with regard to employment prospects of the tourism workers in the areas of a “marked seasonality” that is, those dependent on the “sun and beach” model or winter skiing resorts. Official reports have proved this cross-border trend is evident in most seasonal tourist hot spots. This cycle disproportionately affects young people who resort to seasonal work to escape unemployment, but often become trapped in this cyclical process, where they are unable to follow more sustainable career options. And yet, seasonal workers within the tourism sector have already gained valuable skills that could be utilised for more professional careers. The main objective of the VALITS project was to break this cycle and help young people working in seasonal tourism to find longer term employment opportunities. Five project partners from Spain, Austria, Poland, Bulgaria and Italy cooperated in this project: - Sea Teach (ES) is a VET provider organisation active in tourism 'hot spot' of the Balearic Islands and experienced in the field of validation and comparison of qualifications.- Danmar Computers (PL) contributed its extensive expertise in developing software applications within an educational environment.- Know and Can Association (BG) brought to the project its experience in the field of applying specialized programs to develop social and civil skills using modern methods in non-formal education.- Euro (IT) runs the Alcamo National Park and employs seasonal workers as well as being a training center for the tourism sector.- SMC (AT) is a training centre situated in a winter alpine centre, experienced in offering re-education training and working with seasonal tourism workers.To reach its objectives, the partners undertook the following activities: 1.)The partners identified through extensive desk and field research the 10 most fundamental informal transversal skills and competences, inside and outside of the tourism sector.2.)The consortium developed an assessment methodology that is based on an objective assessment and not self-assessment. From this methodology the partners developed the 'Validation Tool' that assesses the users for their perfomance in all 10 informal transversal skills and provides them after test completion with a meaningful and graded assessment certificate. 3.)Finally the partners created and developed the 'Career Guidance App' that matches the users' identified informal transversal skills to longer term career opportunities that are required by other professional sectors. The VALITS project has provided the two tools, the Validation Tool and the Career Guidance App that have the potential to break the unemployment cycle for short season workers. These VALITS tools have a variety of important impacts and will 1.) provide young seasonal tourism sector workers with new career pathway options that match their informal transversal skills identified in the assessment and are in demand by longer term jobs and careers,2.) help young seasonal tourism sector workers to accelerate their pathways to quality employment in a more linear, less interrupted or detoured way,3.) save employers time and effort firstly in attracting and filtering the right kind of skills in their candidature that can also help them to base their recruitment decision on a transparent and concrete foundation instead of having to rely on subjective assessment and experiences,4.) make employers in the tourism sector more aware of the utilities of their employees’ skills and add new employment plans for them, including job rotation or promotion incentives, and 5.) add complementary tools to the existing EU skills and competency tools like Europass, EURES and ESCO.In the long-term perspective the VALITS Tools can be easily transferred to other target groups and other economic sectors, offering a viable Open Educational Resource (OER) to employees and employers, thereby fostering the recognition and use of informal transversal skills and enabling employees as well as employers to close skills gaps and skills mismatches more efficiently.

The project summary has been provided in English in the above paragraph.

Climate change is a global problem caused by several factors. Among them, deforestation and forest degradation generate 20% of total greenhouse gases emissions, responsible for climate change. For this reason, the Forestry sector plays an important role in the fight against this phenomenon. This is especially significant in the case of the European Union, whose consumption of wood and wood products is one of the highest in the world.Currently, activities focusing on Environmental Education address climate change and forest benefits in a separate way. As a result, society is hindered to understand the important role of forest in climate change. This project idea was born to meet this need.The «Educating on “Climate Forests”» project has counted with the participation of 5 different partners consisting of NGOs and higher education institutions that work with young people from environmental fields or with concerns on current environmental problems. These partner organizations are E-zavod (Slovenia), EURO (Italy), University of Usak (Turkey), Hnutí DUHA - Friends of the Earth (Czech Republic) and, as a coordinating organization, IROKO DFS (Spain).The overall objective of this project has been to broaden the approach of non-formal education to address climate change from the relevance that forests have in its mitigation.To do this, a group of youth workers from the non-formal education field has elaborated environmental education activities merging forests and climate change topics.Once training activities were developed, they were tested in local workshops with groups of at least 10 youngsters (18-30 years old). After these local workshops, results were shared and the best activities were selected to include them in a toolkit containing a) a guidebook with the 50 best activities (available in 6 languages), b) a guidebook annex with other 25 activities designed under the framework of this project and c) a handbook with a list of good practices to reduce the pressure we put on forests. The direct beneficiaries of this project have been the youth workers involved into the project and the participant youngsters in the local workshops.The main expected benefits have included: a) Firstly, for youth workers: to enhance their skills on planning and developing of environmental non-formal education workshops; to create new links and contacts that may generate in future collaborations.b) Secondly, for participant youngsters: to have the opportunity to participate in an active way in the process of evaluation and improvement of the training activities created by the project; to develop a stronger awareness on the relevance that forests have in fighting climate change; to increase their possibilities to get a job as an environmental educator. c) And last, for NGOs, youth organizations and other related entities applying the training material created by this project: to improve their results in design and implementation of environmental non formal education programs, address to sensitize youngsters about the role of forests in fighting climate change.

"CONTEX: The current numbers of early school leaving (ESL) are impressive as far the EU 27 countries and non-EU countries is concerned. According to the Final Report ""Reducing early school leaving: key messages and policy supports"" (Nov. 2013), in the first case we have a 22.8 % and for the second 26.7 % while the native born early school leaving data at 11.6%.In particular the percentages of ESL non-EU born students in the partners countries are : Belgium 26%; France 22,7%; Italy 40,5%; Portugal 19,4 %; Norway 15,3%. According to these data the consortium decided to develop the SHIP project. OBJECTIVES:The principal objective was to reducing the ESL percentage of the students with foreign origin. SHIP project wanted to ensure a parents involvement in the school activities by giving them the possibility to be aware about what is happening within the school attended by their children. In order to reach this aim, improving communication between parents and schools and establishing positive educational environment at home for pupils with migrant background was a precondition. PARTICIPANTS: SHIP targeted 56 parents with half of them in an experimental group and the other half in a control group. Parents were coming from a migrant background and they have been identified according to their origin and the school attainments of their pupils. On the first group it has been implemented the largest part of the activities while the second was just taken as a group control and for measuring the impact of the project. ACTIVITY ORGANIZED AND METHODOLOGY APPLIED After the project redesigning, the coordinator organized the project kick-off meeting on the 01/12/2016. Project managers of each organization have participated and we were ready to start with the IPA (Internal Partnership Agreement) preparation and signatures.A second online meeting was held at the end of June 2017 with the aim to organize the short-term joint staff training event in Oslo. The methodology applied during the project implementation is the traditional PCM (Project Cycle Management) methodology.Then, there has been the short-term joint staff training event held from the 18/09/2016 to the 22/09/2016 during which participants have been trained on MIR good practice by using mostly non-formal and informal learning methodology. The training helped also in better adjusting the methodology for carrying out the activities with the parents. In this case the methodology was non-formal and informal Afterwards, we have had also the activity with the parents: language class, school environment explanation, meeting with school teachers, etc. were some of the activities organized with the parents. 2 transnational project meetings were also put in place in order to focus on the state at the art of the project and the project next step. Finally, the consortium has also organized a dissemination activity in order to promote the result and the activity done by the project.LONG TERM BENEFITS: By parents understanding of the importance of a mutual collaboration with schools and by involving other migrants communities, parents involved in the project can have a positive long term effects. On the other side, teachers by sharing the best practice, have have acquired new and complementary tools, skills and methods to work with pupils with migrant background, developing appropriate pedagogical holistic approaches."