Now What? Preparing and Empowering Youth Leaving Care: 2nd project meeting in Athens with the participation of “The Smile of the Child”
24 July 2018
Athens, 16 July 2018
The 2nd meeting of the European project "Now What?: Preparing and Empowering Youth Leaving Care " funded by the European Program ERASMUS+, took place in Athens on the 11th and 12th of July.
Members of the scientific personnel of “The Smile of the Child” and Athens Lifelong Learning Institute from Greece hosted the meeting, whereas representatives of the organizations of West University Timisoara from Romania (lead partner), University of Lusofona from Portugal, University of Tirana from Albania, DGASPC from Romania, SOS Children’s Villages Romania and SOS Children’s Villages Albania, took part in the event.
The project’s duration is 24 months and it aims at developing and undertaking a comprehensive strategy to better enable care-experienced children deliver improvements in their educational, social and economic outcomes for their preparation for leaving care system and at developing personal and self-care skills such as budgeting, time management, health, nutrition, hygiene, and conflict resolution.
The President of the Board of Directors of the Organization “The Smile of the Child”, Mr. Costas Yannopoulos pointed out: “It is absolutely necessary to cooperate with all the competent bodies at national and international level to provide direct and holistic support to children in care, with dignity and aiming at their autonomy. The collaboration between Universities, Educational Institutes, Public Child Care Organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations is an important step in responding to the great challenge of smoothly integrating young care leavers into society.”
Hence, during the 2nd meeting the methodological approach and the tools of analyzing the needs of young care leavers (project output 1) under the title “The Care Leavers Needs Analysis” and the educational material (project output 2) under the title “The Training Curriculum and Material” were presented and thoroughly discussed. In addition, the Mentoring Component (project output 3) of the young care leavers involved in the project was also analyzed. Moreover, there was a discussion on Life skills workshops (project output 4), which will take place in the partner’s countries during the second year of the project.
Administrative and financial management details of the project were also discussed as well as dissemination and sustainability issues. Moreover, the project management team set the next steps of the project’s implementation.
For more information about the project, please click the project’s website: www.now-what-project.eu
For more information about the project, you can also click here.
