WORKSHOP LED BY VALÉRIE CARRETTE & CARINA GROẞER-KAYA
Valérie Carrette is senior consultant at Hefboom. Hefboom is an organisation in Brussels that supports social organisations by providing consultancy and financing to reach their goals and become more sustainable. Her work focused the last few years on social innovation, social inclusion, migration, labour market and social impact. Valérie coordinated also the transnational ESF project ‘MeMoRe’ in which mentoring to work models for refugees and critical success factors for mentoring have been developed (www.memore.be).

Carina Großer-Kaya is project manager at LAMSA e.V. (Germany) and works as lecturer and trainer at universities and in adult education. Her work and research focuses on migration, labour and social inequality.

ABSTRACT
The Workshop is about Mentoring to work for adult newcomers e.g. refugees with a focus on persons with a migration background and distance to the labour market that lack formal education and without academic certificates. Combining examples from practice of the projects MeMoRe (Hefboom, Belgium) and MeMoGA (LAMSA, Germany) as part of the transnational network the workshop offers exchange of good practice from two perspectives on mentoring to work for refugees. Leading question of the workshop is: How can mentoring to work build a bridge towards sustainable employment and social inclusion for adult newcomers? Integration in the labour market is a critical success factor for the social integration of newcomers in a country. Labour market integration, however, is a challenge. Unemployment among immigrants born outside the EU is 8,4 % higher than that of native populations in EU28 countries. Research indicates that traditional labour market programmes do not always work well for refugees and people with migrant backgrounds, regardless of the effort made by proactive labour market policy-makers.

In Europe, ‘mentoring to work’ programmes are increasingly becoming a solution to this end. Mentoring to work was seen as a successful method for the integration of high qualified newcomers. The challenges faced by highly qualified newcomers are further compounded when it comes to people with lower qualifications.
We explored the question if mentoring to work can be used as an instrument to support the integration into the labour market of refugees and persons with a migration background (e.g.without formal degrees or documented working experiences) and how such a mentoring to work model might look like.
Within the context of the transnational project MeMoRe, two models have been developed.

• Project 1: Mentoring pilot phase as a case study for refugees without certificates and specific profiles (LAMSA)
• Project 2: Mentoring to work as a bridging instrument from Work Integration Social Economy to the regular economy (Hefboom)

We will present the elements of what works in mentoring to work for refugees/persons with a migration background and the conditions that are necessary to realise these elements. Exchanging best practice experiences offers the opportunity to discuss if and how mentoring for adult newcomers can be implemented as a successful instrument and what are critical success factors for mentoring projects for this special target group.