Co-Athens Curing the Limbo

The project

Curing the Limbo builds a holistic model for social integration addressing the issue of the long-term passive “inactivity” that characterises a large part of Athens refugee population. The program which is funded by the Urban Innovative Actions initiative and developed by a multifaceted consortium led by the Athens Development and Destination Management Agency of the City of Athens (ADDMA), supports refugees that have been granted asylum and currently live in Athens to overcome their state of inertia and their sense of social exclusion by becoming more active and more socially engaged. Beneficiaries receive enhanced and meticulously designed priority integration services through a palette of programs such as a social rental agency that supports the process of affordable housing, an experience based learning center with language courses and soft skills training case monitoring and psychosocial support, “street law” knowledge and other basic social skills. At the same time refugees who are in the program establish partnerships and connections with the society of Athens and its people contributing to the needs of the local communities and participating in citizen-led activities with a direct impact in the life of its neighborhoods.   

To model the connections with the city, the civil society and active citizens, the City of Athens has created an agile and versatile accelerator platform entitled co-Athens. Co-Athens empowers collaborations between refugees and locals who co-develop actions with local positive impact for Athens and bring people closer around the development of creative ideas. The program consists of a series of open calls, a funding scheme that finances diverse urban start-ups, experiential workshops, ideation sessions, mentoring and capacity building, public debates, neighborhood reach- out events and other practices and activities. Positioned as Curing the Limbo’s innovation frontrunner to help develop an inclusive model for integration, today it supports 9 collaborative projects with the participation of 40 refugees and 40 locals working over a range of thematic priorities that address neighborhood needs and refugees skills: a neighborhood park place-making initiative through the creation of a local football academy, a green energy cooperative, an exchange food laboratory, theater and music platform, a pilot documentary-based educational program and a training collective for street theater and acrobatics among others. 

The impact of the good practice

Although the program is still a work in progress and is being constantly evaluated, at the moment its impact can be manifested through data and a set of early conclusions.  
 
So far through co-Athens and the overall public engagement program of Curing the Limbo we have managed to: 

• Create a wide community of around 150 local stakeholders that have been included in the development of the program or participated in some of its activities such as public debates on neighborhood needs, private focus groups and interviews, street games, open calls, empowering workshops and open events. 
• Connect 206 participant refugees of Curing the Limbo integration program (stands for 60% of the program’s total registrations number) with civil society activities taking place in Athens contributing to work that impacts the city at a local level 
• Build a robust method to reach out to local communities and neighborhoods. This set of practices, tools and evaluation model can help the City to generate an environment of collaboration and co-creation with a range of city actors when piloting solutions for any given issue that the city is facing 
• Nurture 9 collaborative actions among refugees and locals which deliver impact through their activities. So far those groups have organised 15 public events engaging with 500 locals and 85 refugees residing in the city while establishing partnerships with 17 different local stakeholders that support and amplify their efforts.   

Out of the work done so far we could draw the following early conclusions: 

• Cities can look for allies within their societies when modelling solutions for major societal challenges such as the refugee integration issue. In a context like Athens, where society has been under severe pressure for over a decade, our program found quite a large number of local stakeholders (citizens, grassroots, community groups, local NGO’s that do not necessarily work to support refugees, local businesses, University etc) to partner up in many ways and at different engagement levels: picking up neighbourhood issues in open public debates, organising skills development workshops with locals and refugees, empowering seminars, meetings with the students of Curing the Limbo and working with the language classrooms, connecting the Affordable Housing Scheme with local volunteers l to practice the language, be part of our open call, design with refugees proposals for Athens etc. Over 150 of such groups engaged with our activities while 60 of them applied to the open call of our collaborative actions program to engage deeper with our initiative. 
• In Curing the Limbo we tested and modelled agile and robust methods to bring together refugees with asylum and active citizens’ groups of Athens, co-creating actions with positive impact for the city and its neighborhoods. We started by building up partnerships with neighborhoods bringing up to the surface the needs, priorities and local protagonists as possible partners. Then we worked with refugees of our program to unleash their creativity and self-confidence and understand the ways in which they experience the city and finally we nurtured collaborative actions where locals and refugees were equally involved as partners.
• Invest in empowering both refugees and your local population. It is not only about focusing on refugees when offering support but in your citizens as well as this will help your city resilience. 
• Refugee beneficiaries evaluate their engagement with civil society actors as a very important step to their integration journey – this was not obvious from the beginning – partnering up with locals around creative ideas helped them to get to know the city better, make friends, practice the language and work on their skills development. 60% of the total number of refugees registered in the program connected with city initiatives while 15% became an active part of the core teams that were funded to implement local initiatives in Athens 
• Refugees link their involvement to the citizens’ initiatives/collaborative projects with vocational/skills development. It is not just about becoming volunteers in ad hoc urban project. They value their involvement into activities with citizens to further develop and enhance their skills and acquire self-confidence when doing something they know very well.