Vantaa’s best practices presented in Tallinn
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02 October 2018The City of Vantaa has been invited in Estonia to present its best practices in the field of integration of migrants in occasion of a conference focused on “cooperation between municipalities and local organizations in supporting the settling in and integration for foreign nationals” which took place in Tallinn on the 1st and 2nd of June 2017.
Hannele Lautiola, Local Coordinator of the Arrival Cities project in Vantaa had the opportunity to tell about the results of the URBACT projects MILE (1) and Arrival Cities along with the experience of the multicultural “Tempo Orchestra”, nice example of exchange of good practices among Cities (2).
During the intervention Mrs. Lautiola introduced the City’s approach to cooperation among different organizations and entities, and in particular bringing its experience of the URBACT methodology and Vantaa’s Action Plan. In March in the framework of the Arrival Cities project the local support group organized a consultation meeting aimed at improving cooperation and coordination between the City and NGOs and among NGOs, that is also one of the main points of Vantaa’s Action Plan. The intervention has a great success as most of the participants were representatives of NGOs, municipalities, universities and entrepreneurs, who are at some level dealing with foreign nationals.
Last but not least, we are eager to announce that the City of Vantaa thanks to the work of its ULG has secured funding for 2018 and 2019 from the European Social Fund to develop the project “Coaching together”. The project was planned by the URBACT Local Group of Arrival Cities, and was presented as a case study in Vantaa’s Arrival Cities workshop in January 2017. The project aims at strengthening the collaboration between local authorities and migrants led NGOs by developing together a coaching programme for unemployed migrants. Through a network of partners and a multi-professional approach, the project intends to build a cost effective model to support immigrants, who lived for a long time in Finland, in reaching education, employment and becoming active members of the Finnish Society. The employees working in these NGOs alongside the team of project experts will act as change agents and will build capacity also inside the same NGOs. The strength of the “Coaching Together” project is that it pursues a true, equal partnership between the actors, while building a trusting relationship between the immigrant communities, public services and the NGOs.
(1) MILE stands for "Managing Migration and Integration in Cities and Regions", this project has been developed by the City of Venice in collaboration with 9 other cities, among which Vantaa in the framework of URBACTII programme.(2) The Tempo Orchestra has been created in the framework of the URBACT project (MILE) in which the City of Vantaa and the Municipality of Amadora participated. The idea born during a workshop where Amadora showed, as example of good practice, the Orchestra Project, based on the Venezuelan experience of Simon Bolivar. After this exchange of good practice the Municipality of Vantaa decided to replicate the experience firstly by sending a delegation to Amadora to study the methodology and later by adapting the method to the Vantaa social context. Nowadays there are in Vantaa two schools that developed the tempo orchestra project.
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