Our partnership with The ARIVE Project: Looking back at all we’ve accomplished
With the success of the ARIVE Project through the Erasmus+ scheme, ACH are glad (and saddened) to announce the end of our successful partnership! Here’s everything you need to know about our achievements...
We ventured into a partnership with ARIVE with a focus on employment to develop new integration enhancing provisions to measure an individual’s level of integratedness. What does all of that mean?
- Richard Thickpenny, Chief Innovation Officer (CIO)
First, let’s share some findings from our research that began this whole partnership: the UN Charter states that refugees should not be disadvantaged in relation to the native population. However this is not the case; especially when The Refugees and UK Labour Market report found that on average, those who arrived in the UK for asylum reasons earned £9.12 an hour compared with £13.69 among UK-born workers. Also 75% of refugees who secured entry level employment were still in entry level employment 20 years later which clearly implies that services for refugees were not preparing people to be like the native population.
With statistics like that, here at ACH we knew we had to do better for our tenants. That’s how, through our partnership with the ARIVE Project, we were able to recognise the need for a tool that would help to identify an individual’s requirements for better job opportunities. We sought out to reverse such statistics by developing a tool that would help people thrive.
This led to the development of our theory around integration using Integrass to measure a persons’ level of integratedness: hence our Integrass Toolkit. This would also help us to provide evidence of the improvements so that we’d have proof to back up our findings and further spread this much needed Toolkit.
Our partnership with the ARIVE Project provided a test-bed for ideas on how to improve and enhance the integration experience of refugees and other vulnerable migrants. This test-bed of ideas then formed our completed Integrass Toolkit - a short assessment that helps an individual become more integrated. Crucially, it extends beyond employment and language and takes a more holistic look at an applicant instead of relying on the more traditional aspects. The Toolkit allows for the existence of a new avenue purposely made for those who are disadvantaged in a traditional job seeking sense.
For this project, we worked with partners from across Europe such as: Rinova in the UK, Folksuniversitet in Sweden, Dimitra in Greece and ERIFO in Italy. Through the use of these various societies we were able to attain a rich data pool of information that allowed ACH to develop a UK specific version of the Integrass Toolkit. This then enabled us to more accurately establish which of the provisions we offered had the maximum benefit for our participants.
Overall, ARIVE was a success! Around 50 beneficiaries participated directly in the ARIVE Project with a total of 400 people having completed an Integrass assessment to date, going to show how we collectively helped to establish a new, fairer measurement that allows you to benchmark a refugees level of integratedness.
