Refugee Engagement And integration through Community Theatre – is a Creative Europe’s project which uses community theatre to promote and develop refugee integration at local level.
The project wants to introduce Community Theatre as a tool to foster a positive intercultural dialogue between the refugees and the host society in an appropriate way that the available competences of the refugees suffice.
The project has tested and compared a number of integration and educational approaches in each partner country in order to come up with an innovative participatory method to be used for refugee integration across the EU.
In this way, the REACT project aims at reaching a better social cohesion in diversity, mutual understanding and appreciation between the newly arrived refugees and the local population, in addition to equipping them with new skills and competences.
The project had 2 main phases:
Year 1: to carry out three national projects in local communities, and
Year 2: Sharing results and developing educational models and toolkit for refugee-related work. The project’s final outputs have been shared with other stakeholders in the same and other fields for multiplying replicable effect.
Through the participation of non-professional participants
and professional theatre facilitators REACT has aimed to:
Create empathy
intercultural understanding and dialogue between refugees and hosting communities
Develop personal skills
self-esteem, creativity, language and communication skills -friendships and networks between refugees and people from wider community
Challenge prejudice
and misconceptions by giving refuges the opportunity to tell their own stories; breaking down barriers and presenting refugees as human beings with a life-story, values and talents;
Sharing good practices
on the field of the social inclusion and integration, improving the network among organizations;
Create models
of good practice which can be replicated at local levels in other European countries.
PARTNERSHIP
acta Community Theatre ltd,
UK (Coordinator)
Contact: Neil Beddow
neil@acta-bristol.com
Stichting Rotterdams Wijktheater,
The Netherlands
Contact: Heleen Hameete
heleen@rotterdamswijktheater.nl
Centro Per Lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci”, Italy
Contact: Alberto Biondo
alberto.biondo@danilodolci.org