The Educational Workshops Initiative as a Neighbourhood Mediation Tool

The city has noted an increasing deterioration leading to the disaffection and breakdown in the relationship between groups of youths (14-25 years old) and the various institutions (City Council, Social Centres, Schools, shopping centres, Housing Associations, Police) and the residents in different neighbourhoods.

This breakdown takes the form of a fresh upsurge of tension palpable in everyday life: gatherings in the common areas of apartment buildings, accompanied by disturbances, heightened tensions between these groups of youths and the staff of the housing associations, the Police and the residents, making an educational relationship between these groups and social workers (teachers, facilitators, social workers) very difficult to sustain, especially as it is sometimes non-existent or almost impossible to build.

The Educational Workshop is part of a comprehensive prevention and mediation approach, in advance of the social integration methods. The objectives are as follows:
    - to help youths to build self-confidence
    - to respond to a need for recognition or praise
    - to gauge their motivation to work
    - to help them to adapt their behaviour in particular by integrating rules related to group life
    - to give them a taste of work experience and introduce them to the economic reality of the working world
    - to open the youth’s eyes a to good citizenship through participation in work that has a common interest
    - to create a link with the neighbourhood residents and the institutions

The purpose of Educational Workshop is also to provide neighbourhood socio-educational actors (teachers, facilitators ...) with a prevention tool for mediation and citizenship, which changes their everyday work and creates the conditions which favour a positive relationship with education and which helps to position the youth adult upstream on the road to integration, as part of a climate of appeasement with the institutions and people.

The project started in 2006.
Last review: September 2015.