Ani-Mate & Meet the Other offers informal education to refugee and local children in Rhodes, Kos, Leros and Tilos, islands of the South Aegean Sea, a crossroad for refugees.

The project provides a variety of creative workshops addressed to mixed groups of refugee children and students of elementary schools, including animation, photography and music workshops. At the same time, it raises awareness of local people regarding refugees with additional cultural events for children and adults. Among these are film screenings and photography exhibitions.

The basic idea of Ani-Mate & Meet the Other is that only through children, adults can learn how to coexist with the other. Informal education, arts and culture are used to create solidarity among the local communities and refugee children. Last but not least, the project helps refugee children to enroll in the Greek schools and thereby contributes to integration.

Until now, Ani-Mate & Meet the Other has implemented educational workshops with 250 children and cultural events with 1500 children and adults. The future goal is to continue workshops and events not only in the islands but also in Athens, where the majority of the refugee population lives and a huge need for education and integration exists.

Ani-Mate & Meet the Other involves a variety of creative workshops of informal education for refugee children and primary school students of Rhodes. This includes an Animation Workshop, Photography Workshop, Shadow Theater Workshop, Radio Station Workshop and a Musical Workshop.

The program aims at raising awareness of the refugee issue with the local community through workshops of informal education and additional cultural events for children and adults. Among these are film screenings, a children’s art craft exhibition, a photography exhibition, and a concert.

The basic idea of Ani-Mate & Meet the Other is that only through children, adults can learn how to coexist with the other (in this case the refugee). Informal education, arts and culture are used to create solidarity among the local community and refugee children. At the same time, the initiative helps to enroll refugee children in Greek schools and thereby contributes to integration.

The project “We are all born free” aimed to strengthen the intercultural communication of children in the neighborhood of Barmbek at Hamburg.

Through informal education, animation and literature, we connected 2 groups of children (8-12 years old) from the local school Kinderforum Hamburg and from a local refugee camp. The 2 day workshop was conducted by a filmmaker, an animator and a librarian, with a Syrian student as translator; and it was organized by Kulturpunkt in cooperation with the Library of Hamburg. It was supported by START and Welcome to Barmbek NGO.

Alongside the public presentation of the resulting film at Barmbek°Basch socio-cultural center and the sharing of home- made food by refugees, we strengthened the social integration of refugees with an open call to artists who can offer other workshops for refugee children.

In addition, a painting workshop “POSTCARDS from HOME” was conducted for refugee children in cooperation with START fellow Photini Papahatzi.