Our SEMPRE partner University College South Denmark (UC SYD) has created two Local Empowerment Networks in the municipalities of Varde and Tønder in South Denmark. They organised a first workshop with the two municipalities on 22nd August 2017 in Esbjerg.
UC SYD is planning a series of workshops in each quarter of the year in order to coordinate and with the purpose of exchanging experiences, sharing concepts, approaches, learning and knowledge and inspiring and supervising future work in the LENs and the micro projects. Participants in the workshops are SEMPRE staff from UC SYD and representatives from the two LENs in Toender and Varde. Varde was represented by NEW-think integration Varde works with co-creation in a flexible group, which means that different people show up at different times depending of theme and time.
The next workshop will take place in November 2017.
About our LEN in Varde:
We are pursuing two micro projects:
Cross culture: A group of primary young refugees working empowerment oriented. They meet, develop an idea and realise it. They are very active and good at fundraising and realising their ideas. This summer they have planned and organised a camp for single parents and their children. They raised funding for the camp and it was very successful.
Traumatized refugee families: Staff members are working with action learning. The project has quite newly started and has not yet carried through a whole process.
About our LEN in Toender:
The network has decided to start working on how to empower refugee families so their children grow up to be resourceful adults. A smaller group within the network is planning a workshop for families to be held in three different cities in the municipality. The plan is to make a family night that starts with a potluck and where a local brass band will play. After the potluck they have different local leisure associations to make activities for the children while the parents participate in a workshop. They have not yet decided which methods to use in the workshop but the plan is to take the parents through four steps: Identifying specific challenges they face, their wishes for change, their possibilities for making the change they wish for and a plan for action. They might use theory of change to structure the process after the first step.
Photos: (c) UC SYD
