NET FOR U – Needs Tackling and NETworks Tracing FOR Unaccompanied minors integration

The main goal of the project is to define an effective multidimensional intervention programme aimed at improving the integration of unaccompanied foreign minors, ensuring their needs and interests, strengthening both their individual social networks and new form of cooperation within and between services and stakeholders. Unaccompanied minors is a target at high risk of social exclusion and with specific needs which must be regularly reviewed (with a precise attention also to those minors requiring special care, protection or treatment for their physical or mental health). The primary purposes of the project are:

• to elaborate a knowledge-based intervention model to improve helpful practices both of on-going special needs assessment (in order to elaborate coherent life-project for each minors) and common family tracing procedures (in order to map familiar relationships as possible care resources to sustain positive paths and wellbeing and/or to promote family reunification);
• to provide minors with appropriate opportunities of training and education, social and leisure activities, participation in cultural life of the context where they live, increasing the opportunities of interaction with their peers and adults of the host society, including with those belonging to the same national or cultural group in order to provide occasions for the minors to live their own culture, ensuring the respect for diversity together with the promotion of the integration in the collective life
• to build a permanent transnational cooperation within professionals, stakeholders, social workers and all other figures who work with unaccompanied foreign minors to define international measures, to share positive practices concerning the integration of unaccompanied foreign minors.

The project is articulated in the following phases:

• Recognition and in-depth analysis of practices on specific needs assessment and family tracing;
• Creation of Toolkit for a common approach to special needs assessment and family tracing;
• Development of a transnational strategy targeted to unaccompanied foreign minors;
• Local experimentation of the Toolkit and related evaluation;
• Mainstreaming and dissemination of the activities and project results, using several channels and measures.