The first Phase included a Coordination meeting with each partner representative. The Coordination meeting took place in September 2018 hosted by our partners in Greece, The House of Europe.

As result of this first encounter, Local Coordination Teams were created by each partner organisation

The training course, as part of this project, takes place in Tallinn. The Capacity Building is specially addressed to the team members responsible for implementing the Living Library actions in each partner-country in frames of the “Expressions in Dialogue” project.

At the training course, the national teams of partner-organisations gain competences in preparation implementation and evaluation of the Living Library event.

But not only that. The educational part of the training course provides knowledge, skills and and develops attitudes of participants in Intercultural learning and social inclusion, which is very important for the work back home dealing with the human books, facilitators, librarians and everyone involved in the running of the Living Libraries.

After implementation of the Living Libraries by the partner-organisations, the participants will meet again in Barcelona in autumn to share their experiences, their work as teams and create materials for the common web platform focusing on practices of inclusive youth work. Living Library will be presented as well there as one of the tools for inclusion of young migrants and refugees.

After the Capacity-Building training course (in February 9-16 in Tallinn), all the partners organisations were busy with the creation of the active group committing to organise their local actions – Living Library – and were doing necessary preparations for implementing Living Library event locally. This preparation includes, of course, logistical and technical preparation, but more importantly, finding and preparing the Human Books (“the catalogue”) and dissemination of the invitations and calls for the Living Library event.

All the partners advanced a lot in this process and as a result 5 Living Library local events were planned to take place between May and June 2019. Finally, as a big success and engagement of the local teams 8 Living Library events took place:

• On the 2nd and 3rd of May – We Organisation (in Hague, the Netherlands);
• On the 11th of May – House of Europe (Rhodes, Greece);
• On the 1st June – AHEAD (Barcelona, Catalonia);
• On the 8th of June – Young Effect Association (In Magenta, Italy);
• On the 15th of June – AHEAD (Barcelona, Catalonia);
• On the 20th of June – by Trajectory@ (Tallinn, Estonia);
• On the 12th of July – House of Europe (In Athens, Greece).

In parallel to the event in Italy, the Expressions in Dialogue Coordinators’s meeting took place in Magenta (Italy) on  7th to 10th June 2019. This time each national coordinator attended together with one representative of the local Living Library team. The agenda included evaluation and sharing the results of local Living Libraries, that had already taken place and the progress of preparations of the ones, that were still to come.

A second Training activity was hosted in Catalonia and invited the coordination teams involved in the preparation, implementation and evaluation of the local Living Library event(s) in each partner-country. Each team was composed by a balanced group of youth migrants and refugees as well as representatives of the hosting communities. They were as well representing diverse actors of the Living-Library-teams: Human Books, Facilitators, Librarians, Readers and Coordinators to join the meeting.

After the implementation of the Living Libraries, the representatives of all the teams got together to share their experience, challenges, solutions and talk about the process of preparation, implementation and evaluation of their local events, from perspective of the inclusion of refugees and migrants, who were involved as participants in all the roles within this process.

After that meeting and closing the Expressions in Dialogue project a Dissemination Meeting took place in  February 2020 hosted by our partners in Rhodes.

More about the meeting