AR 2017/Activities

Global Education Unit

Make Fruit Fair!

Overall objective(s)

• to contribute to more coherent and sustainable development policies of the EU, its Member States and the private sector integrating human rights, decent work and trade.
• to ensure better living and working conditions for small farmers and workers in the tropical fruit sector.

The action contributes to establishing the post-MDG agenda aiming at providing a Decent Life for All by 2030.

Specific objective(s)

• to raise the awareness of consumers and citizens in European Member States on the interdependencies between the EU and developing countries exporting tropical fruits
• to mobilise them to take action and urge corporate and political decision makers to ensure fair conditions in the tropical fruit sector.

Map Your Meal!

Overall objective(s)

• Contribute to the EYD2015 by enhancing public awareness and understanding of global interdependencies through exploring the global food system
• Mobilise young people to become engaged in promoting global social justice and sustainable ways of living
• Connect European initiatives for sustainable living with similar initiatives in Global South, fostering greater understanding of the concepts of food sovereignty and sustainable food production and supply chains

Specific objective(s)

• Based on a comprehensive smart phone application and accompanying interactive learning materials exploring the origins of their food, their individual components and the socio-economic and environmental impact of these, this project aims to raise people's awareness about interdependencies and injustices and about the need for more sustainable food systems.

Supply Cha!nge

Overall objectives:

• Support and promote all the objectives of the EYD 2015;
• Facilitate and contribute to pan-European debates on sustainable development in the post-MDG framework;
• Contribute to the achievement of previous MDGs 1,2,3,7 and 8 (valid until 2015, then further elaborated in SDGs and post-MDGs);
• Enhance the understanding of European citizens of the interdependencies between sustainable consumption and production patterns in Europe and global sustainable development.

Activities:

• Awareness Raising: Engaging and informing citizens about the impact of their lifestyles and consumer choices with a variety of activities, among these the European Food Vision Photo Contest and Exhibition, as well as a European wide Day of Action.
• Business Dialogue: develop and conduct capacity building programmes for businesses to provide solutions for hotspots of global supply chains, as well as inviting professionals from producing countries to give first hand information on working conditions and environmental issues.
• Policy Advocacy: development of policy recommendations. These set the framework for more sustainable sourcing in European supermarkets.
• Research: to collect first hand data on the production patterns of European retail supply chains. By means of independent research we are tracing the sourcing practices of European companies to producing countries and provide recommendations on how to improve working conditions and mitigate environmental impact. Among others we have sent teams to investigate production examples of tuna, pineapple, orange juice, chocolate, as well as studies into the effectiveness of ecological and social certification schemes.

Humanitarian Affairs Unit

Strengthening Asylum for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Cyprus

As implementing partner to the UNHCR representation in Cyprus, the Future Worlds Center is responsible for monitoring the access of asylum seekers to the asylum procedure of the Republic of Cyprus as well as to advocate for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, provide individual advice, support and counselling. The purpose of the particular action is to reduce the difficulties of asylum seekers to get access to general information on the refugee concept, rights and obligations under the national asylum procedure, the provision of legal advice and counselling as well as the necessary well targeted interventions with the relevant staff in the ministries to address shortcomings in policy and practice. In practical terms the legal advisors of the project also provide assistance to asylum seekers with deserving cases to prepare their appeals for the Reviewing Authority. The current project is also responsible for facilitating the local integration of persons of concern to UNHCR and raising awareness over the plight of refugees within the local community. Since 2014, psychological support is also provided to individuals and groups of people seeking assistance, with a particular focus on the Syrian population.

Results of the action: Strengthening Asylum in Cyprus is an ongoing process of awareness raising, and legal support services. Nevertheless the expected impact concentrates on the protection of the beneficiary population, with particular sensitivity towards women refugees and children, including adolescents. In addition, associates, volunteers and friends working with the action have carried clothes and gifts drive for asylum seekers, refugees and their families while solid outcomes of the action also include a booklet with information for Asylum Seekers and Refugees on applying for Asylum in Cyprus.

Unit for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture

The Unit for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (URVT) aims to support and promote the empowerment and rehabilitation of torture victims and victims of trafficking who are asylum seekers or persons granted with international protection status in Cyprus and to assist them to integrate into the local society. It takes a holistic approach, offering legal advice and social assistance directly to the persons of concern and their families, as well as referring them for medical and psychological care. Its services are facilitated through a structure designed on the standards of the Istanbul Protocol - United Nations Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment - and its services are offered to the beneficiaries by specialised, experienced and well-trained personnel. In addition, URVT functions in association to a network of volunteer service providers, medical professionals, and interpreters.

Results of the action: During 2015, URVT continued to assist victims of torture and their family members in a holistic manner consolidating a victim-centered approach in designing services tailored to the needs of each individual. A significant number of the beneficiaries during the reporting year was subjected to sex and gender based torture and/ or gender-specific forms of ill-treatment due to their gender and sexual orientation. The Unit’s services integrated with a gender mainstreaming approach have successfully addressed the needs of this particular vulnerable group.

Provision of Free Legal Advice to Asylum Seekers in Cyprus

Overall Objective

Provision of Free Legal Assistance to Asylum Seekers’ mission is to to provide free, confidential, and independent legal advice and representation, to asylum seekers throughout the asylum procedure and to ensure that they have access to their rights.

In short the action aims to extend the provision of free legal assistance to asylum seekers, by;

• Ensuring asylum seekers receive well informed legal advice, representation, and assistance on their individual asylum cases throughout the asylum process.
• Increasing the number of asylum seekers who receive these services provided by the Future Worlds Center’s Humanitarian Affairs Unit.

Services

The action will specificaly focus on assisting asylum seekers, who are currently undergoing their 1st and 2nd instance during the asylum procedure. The following services will be provided to asylum seekers by competent and experienced legal professionals;

• Information on asylum procedures, the refugee status process, access to rights, and compliance under national, and EU, refugee law.
• Representation throughout legal procedures, both before the Asylum Service and Refugee Reviewing Authority.
• Representation services include representation during personal interviews, representation to asylum seekers in detention facilities, and preparation of comprehensive and well-argued appeals brought before the relevant reviewing body.
• Written and oral Interventions towards the appropriate authorities on issues related to the asylum procedure, determination process and access to rights.
• Interpretation wherever needed by experienced and confidential interpreters will be utilized to provide free legal services to non-Greek or English speaking asylum seekers.

Improvement of the Situation of Asylum Seekers in Cyprus

Overall Goal & Objectives

The project implemented by the Humanitarian Affairs Unit takes a holistic approach by working both at the individual and the societal levels. By offering legal services, we will respond to the needs of the target population, who are one of the most marginalised groups in the country and by launching public advocacy and awareness-raising activities we will affect xenophobic public attitudes, discriminatory state policies and practices in an effort to make Cyprus a more inclusive and accepting host society.

Project Objectives

1. Wider population receiving legal representation and consultation

2. Increase individual/group interventions facilitating target group’s access their fundamental rights

3. Respond to discriminatory and negative state policies/legislation, and promote inclusive ones

4. Respond to racist/xenophobic attitudes in the media/social media, and to general racist attitudes

New Media Lab

R&I PEERS

The R&I PEERS project is based on the concept of gender equality, that can be expressed as “women and men enjoy the same status and have equal opportunity to realize their full human rights and potential to contribute to national, political, economic, social and cultural development, and to benefit from the results”. It aims at creating and validating pilot experiences aiming at disrupting the gender-biased approach and those unconscious rules that limit the participation and the career of women in research and innovation in the Mediterranean Area. To do so, we will leverage on the synergies of structured dialogues and women’ empowerment through skills and entrepreneurial perspective of research and innovation.

Objectives:

• Implementation and improvement of 7 Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) in R&I related organisations
• Smooth the gap of gender representation in decision-making and research-performing processes
• Maximise the impact and the efficacy of gender content into the research programmes

MARINA

The Marina proposal overall aim is to create an all-inclusive Knowledge Sharing Platform (KSP) catalysing and organising the convergence of already existing networks, communities, on-line platforms and services providing an online socio-technical environment that facilitates and stimulates the direct engagement of researchers, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), citizens, industry stakeholders, policy and decision makers, research funders and communicators for improving Responsible Research and Innovation.

Objectives:

• Engage citizens and stakeholders in a highly participatory debate/consultation/process for federating Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) communities and initiatives, by supporting the Science with and for Society Community by facilitating new and lasting partnerships, cultivating joint visions and scenarios that connect societal needs with future expected advances in Science related to marine issues and their impact on the Societal Challenges.
• Create and validate a comprehensive networking and knowledge sharing platform (KSP) for relevant projects, service contracts, marine actors, educational institutions and citizens, to support and enable discussion, Mobilization and Mutual Learning, knowledge exchange and co-production of different communities related with the MARINA key strategic issues (environmental issues, sustainable development, policies and educational challenges) in the perspectives of the societal challenges and the RRI topics.
• Federate RRI communities including citizens in the KSP also by using an online platform for experimentation, training and knowledge and expectation capturing for facilitating the dialogue and shared understanding among scientists, policymakers, citizens and other stakeholders.
• Deliver guidelines and good practices for RRI assessment and promote them to CSOs, industry stakeholders, policy and decision makers, research funders, educational institutions to foster their adoption as a potential benchmark in setting-up RRI processes.
• Provide recommendations and policy options for RRI relating to marine issues at EU, national and subnational levels.
• Communicate and Disseminate broadly in Europe early in the project for enabling the MARINA activitiesand creating RRI and Marine issues awareness; and outside Europe through the partners and associated partners’ wide professional and social networks to promote the European leadership in RRI governance.

RiskTrack

The RiskTrack project aims to help in the prevention of terrorism through the identification of radicalisation by assisting in the identification and tackling of factors or indicators that raise a red flag about which individuals or communities are being radicalised and recruited to commit violent acts of terrorism.

The specific objectives for the universal learning environment are: The project will particularly aim to:

• study indicators of radicalisation in terrorism in order to create a formal risk assessment methodology in this field;
• develop a software tool with the ability to gather, represent, pre-process and analyse the information extracted from web sources;
• enhance the cooperation, knowledge sharing and awareness raising among judges, prosecutors, LEAs and other actors in the fight against terrorism.

Providing ICT-based formal and informal care at home (SENIOR-TV)

SENIOR-TV is a system that “resides” at home, in the living room at the homes of older adults, a place that is very familiar, using a domestic appliance that has always been with them, and that now gets “smart” in order to promote their activity, avoid their physical and cognitive deterioration, and keeping them in contact with their loving ones for as long as possible.

Overall objective

SENIOR-TV project will design and implement a multichannel intelligent platform for offering formal and informal caregiving services to older adults that live at their own homes, with special attention being paid at active prevention, and fostering a high-quality, long, and healthy life. Results, as illustrated here bellow, clearly reflect a trend: in homes of older adults, the intelligent TV must become the central ICT hub.

Specific objectives

• To use Smart TV in combination with Smartphones and tablets, as main interfaces; and to use other secondary peripherals (e.g. Wii, Kinect) for certain services.
• To identify the best technological opportunity for offering a caregiving system targeted at older adults during the first six months of the project. We will conduct research on the systems that were identified in Section 2.1, always having as a reference the technological platform SAM-TV, whose success was proven.
• To design formal and informal caregiving services targeted at older adults that live at their own home. From the very beginning, end user associations that are part of the consortium will be involved in the identification of needs, establishing priorities for an iterative development. Secondary and tertiary end users that have demonstrated its commitment14 to the proposal will form an integral part of the design process, facilitating its participation online in all cases where it is not possible to participate in person—the presence of partners from the same country pretends to promote their involvement.
• To design services aimed at helping older adults to keep in touch with friends, family, caregivers, and other members of the community. Thanks to the use of very simple interfaces in a familiar platform—the TV—the still existing digital gap between older adults and relatives and young caregivers will shrink (e.g. the communication via Facebook or Twitter could take place from a TV in the side of the older adult and from a smartphone in the side of their grandchildren or caregiver).
• To take into account the cultural and administrative diversity Southeast Europe, in terms of systems of care for the elderly. The participation of end-user associations from countries like Cyprus, Slovenia and Romania with the involvement of research institutions and companies with experience in this sector guarantees this fact.
• We will carry out pilot tests of the developed systems with a minimum number of 300 different users, distributed among the three countries in three different cycles, one for each year of the project. Each cycle is composed of a set of iterations, thus allowing for rotating the same devices (HTPCs, TVs, or any other element identified at the beginning of the project) among different homes in each country, and enabling an efficient use of the material for which financing is being requested in this proposal. The objective of structuring the project in several cycles is to facilitate the gathering of feedback in order to refine services, guarantee an efficient integration of all the services of SENIOR-TV, and identify particular elements of each country that may influence the final design of a holistic system.
• To develop a business plan that allows for the companies involved in consortium to start marketing the product SENIOR-TV no later than one year after the finalisation of the project. All the end-user organisations involved in the consortium will take part actively in the development of the business plan—including secondary and tertiary end-user organisations. Likewise, we will use the feedback gathered during the third cycles of testing pilots and direct opinion from older adults. This line of action will start from the first month of the project.

Epods

EPODS supports teachers/trainers in Second Chance Education in their continuous professional development. It assists these educators to set their own development goals, take courses and monitor their progress. In this way, the EPODS online professional development services enable teachers/trainers to maintain the high level of support to learners. E-learning courses and an e-learning creation tool further support the accessible and continuous learning of teachers/trainers.

Objectives:

• To promote European integration of professional development of teachers/trainers in second chance education
• To set up an organic / growing database connecting tools, schools, teachers/trainers and beneficiaries