Solution4Inclusion - Solution focused training tools to enhance social inclusion

To solve or to contribute to the solution of problems using the Psychological science is at the very core mission of the Applicant organization, Empoderar and of their founders. In this project, we are specifically targeting the challenges of inclusion and integration in society. Organizations that work towards integration or integration seldom have enough budget to have high-quality learning opportunities in these field, and Solution focused training is as effective and useful as it is very expensive. We tackled these hurdles by mounting a partnership with a top-tier organization, The Helsinki Brief Therapy Institute (LTI) on using and teaching solution focus techniques. This institution counts with the world renowned trainer of solution-focused psychology and an active innovator of solution-focused methods, that as written many books about it, Ben Furman, that with the talented Tapani Ahola funded this organization. With that we addressed the needs of the organizations that promote integration and inclusion, their staff and their beneficiaries. It also answered to our need of better reply to these needs, at the same time that improve our staff capability on these fields.

The main objective was to promote inclusion and integration on disadvantage target groups (E.g. migrant and refugees and Neets) by supporting professionals that work in organizations that have this supportive role. We did it by creating high-quality learning opportunities on solution focused Psychology approach, that will improve the competences of adult educators on using these tools to better work as a team and to better and more effectively promote inclusion and integration.

To achieve achieve our goals we: 1. Had training among the consortium to enhance our Skills of teaching and promoting change with solution focused Psychology approach ( 4 Persons); 2- Created guidelines on how to intervene effectively with solution focused approach in this context; 3 - Gave training using these techniques to professionals of organizations that support disadvantage target groups, in order to improve the support given ( 30 Persons), 4 - Disseminate these tools with workshops on how to use these techniques (50 Persons).

All the proposed outputs were successfully accomplished. We had training among the consortium, that allows us to boast our skills on how to teach and promote change with solution focused approach. With that we were able to give training to social workers on how to implement this approach in their practice, and we create guidelines to be used to anyone that is interested. We also promote workshops on how to use the manual ant the approach. With these results, we promoted inclusion and integration on hundreds of persons from disadvantage groups by creating high-quality learning opportunities on the solution focused approach, that improved the competences of adult educators on using these tools to better work as a team and to better and more effectively promote inclusion and integration. We not only gave training, but we also created guidelines that are being used, and workshops on how to better used it. The Guidelines are free, available online in Portuguese, English and Finnish. The feedback from the training, the guidelines and the workshops was highly positive in each of the criteria measured.