Young newcomers (asylum seekers/refugees) at the core of local communities

In Belgium, the reception situation for asylum seekers and newcomers is difficult: people sleep in the street in the middle of winter, the applying procedures for regularisation are often very long... However, there are projects that encourage meetings and exchanges between people in local communities.

Despite difficult situations, volunteers, citizens and NGOs are organising themselves to create links of solidarity between newcomers and local communities. There are many projects and actors that give a human meaning and aim to recreate a link between communities. The activity proposes to briefly take stock of the reception policies for newcomers and living together in Belgium by meeting organisations for which immigration and cultural differences is the core business, and then to discuss them with regard to the different realities of the European participants.

The objectives of the visit :

The general objective of this study visit is to encourage the exchange of ideas, meetings of youth workers and grassroots organisations that deal with the issues of asylum seekers on a daily basis. The general idea is to observe what is happening in Belgium that could feed a reflection and concrete practices around living together and the reception of newcomers.

In order to reach this, we propose to:

Discover the structures and field actors who, on daily basis, work with young refugees in order to include them in the local community through cultural or entrepreneurial initiatives;

Discuss and compare different Belgian and European situations in this field and see if some can be adapted or not to different realities when working with young refugees;

Network and see if transnational projects can arouse from this study visit

Profile of participants :

This mission is only open to youth workers, social workers, project managers working directly with young newcomers (refugees and asylum seekers) in the field of inclusion and promoting the positive cohabitation between young migrants and local communities, and ready to discover and exchange about experience and practices in Belgium but also from European colleagues.

This is not a personal development activity.

Participation is compulsory until the end of the program. Project ends on Friday night and departures are planned on Saturday 1st/04/2023.

As far as the provisional programme is concerned :

Arrival on Monday 27th of March 2023: Ice breaker and group dynamic evening

Tuesday 28th of March: getting to know each other and each other’s realities / introduction to the Belgian system  (administrative structures, ONG landscape, asylum stakeholders):

Wednesday 29/03/2023: Field visits in Brussels and debriefing

Thursday 30/03/203 : Field visits in Liège and debriefing

Friday 31/03/2023 : Back to different national realities / Networking opportunities / Evaluation of the activity

Departure on Saturday 1st/04/2023