WORKSHOP LED BY ALBA PI & JÚLIA PÀMIES
Alba Pi works at Punt de Referència as a mentoring coordinator, an association that works with foster care, offering support to young people currently in foster care, and those in the process of moving from foster care to independent living. The association’s mission is to promote emancipation. Alba holds a degree in Political Science and Social Work awarded by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Alba coordinates a project called Atenea, focused on improving the quality of education in youth. Alba is an experienced mentoring trainer, responsible for the international area of Punt de Referència. She is fascinated by how mentoring and bonds of trust can smooth the path to emancipation.

Júlia Pàmias Prohias, born in Barcelona, is a political scientist and holds a master in International Relations. After some national and international experiences, in 2013 she moves to Italy where she starts to work with DCI Italy as a social researcher. Along the years she has been involved in different European projects. She has dealt with coordination, research, training and advocacy activities mainly in the fields of child rights, migration, juvenile justice and protection against violence. She is in charge of the implementation of the Re-Generations project on social mentoring for young migrant people in Italy.

ABSTRACT
The present workshop aims at sharing some considerations to understand the meaning of adopting a Human Rights-based approach to social mentoring as an ethical and practical safeguard. This approach assumes that HHRR instruments can be used as analytical, operational and methodological tools in any activity with social implications that involves persons, citizens, young people, children. The proposal is that social mentoring represents a great opportunity to propose HHRR not just as a legal tool but as a framework that could help at defining the construction of a rights-based pedagogy. We refer here to pedagogy as the study of the educational problem in all its aspects, which includes the determination of aims and objectives together with the research and the methodologies aimed at achieving them. Through an interactive exercise, participants will have the occasion to reflect on how mentoring becomes a way to concretely implement Human Rights and to involve the society in a paradigm that shifts from an approach based on needs to an approach based on rights, with all the implications that this entails. The workshop will also aim at highlighting some considerations that show the strengths of assuming the present approach, including:

• How HHRR can favour a multidisciplinary approach as a way of using knowledge that connects different professionals, volunteers and disciplines.
• How HHRR can constitute a methodological tool to
  • analyse social phenomena such as migration, social exclusion/integration, child protection;
  • identify violations of rights and institutional infringements that determine
    vulnerabilities;
  • design and execute strategies, actions and programs of social relevance, including mentoring.
• How HHRR can explain the notion of vulnerability by considering the relation between the person and the surrounding context from the micro to the macro levels.
• How HHRR can help at overcoming the fragmentation of the system and at developing comprehensive and integrated interventions. Integration is here understood not only in relation with the social conditions but also between the various dimensions that compose the life of a person.
• How HHRR can qualify the systemic and ecological approach that should define any social mentoring relationship in order to contextualise it within a critical but useful vision of the contemporary world.
• How HHRR are interlinked and how this interconnection that rights provide can determine meaning and orientation to individual biographies.
• How HHRR require a personal, existential, professional positioning that becomes not only an ethical safeguard but also a key element of individual credibility, also in the eyes of mentees. Mentoring can be read as an action of active citizenship that allows reaffirming a civil positioning.
• How HHRR represent a good reason to sustain the promotion of mentoring and the search for support.

After exposing the framework of Humans Rights, we will proceed to explain how to shift from a needs-based approach on to a rights-based approach in our social mentoring programs. Participants will have the opportunity to work on mentoring cases in order to apply these concepts to real-life scenarios.