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London: Making Museums A Hub For Integration
In celebration of Refugee Week, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), offered visitors a unique opportunity to see their collections from the perspective of volunteer guides from London’s refugee communities.
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Barcelona: ODAME, School of Entrepreneurship for Women
Creating equal opportunities to start and grow small businesses is important to the entrepreneurial culture of a city like Barcelona, especially when equal means men, women, and immigrants.
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East London: Digging in for Community
Members of the Coriander Club live in Tower Hamlets, an area better known for its street markets and curry houses than for its green space. Communal gardening provides fresh South Asian produce and conversation.
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Bristol, UK: The Bristol Bike Project
The Bristol Bike Project is built on a simple idea: collect unwanted bikes, work with refugees and asylum seekers to repair them and then give the bikes to them to allow them to get around the city.
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Toronto: DiverseCity Counts, Measuring Leadership Success
DiverseCity Counts is a three-year project to measure the diversity of leadership in the Greater Toronto Area. Part of DiverseCity: The Greater Toronto Leadership Project, the initiative asks: Is the face of urban leadership a fair reflection of the local population?
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Helsinki: Business Counseling for Entrepreneurial Success
EntrepriseHelsink is a proactive and practical business-counseling service that helps new entrepreneurs, and new immigrants, launch their ideas with confidence.
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Antwerp: Weaving Newcomers into the Local Marketplace
When Aldegonde Van Alsenoy, founder and coordinator of Betet Skara, had the entrepreneurial genius to promote the community’s knowledge of the ancient art of pit weaving as a ‘professional qualification’, she was on her way to creating a small business enterprise –and helping integrate skilled refugees into their new home in Antwerp.
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Toronto: StartRight with Scotiabank
Imagine being able to set up a bank account, build a credit history, obtain a credit card and organize a mortgage all before you leave your country of origin. That’s the idea behind ScotiaBank’s StartRight Program. ScotiaBank is a Canadian bank with a presence in more than 50 countries and a commitment to serving multicultural communities…
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Menden, DE: All Kids are VIPs
The “Alle Kids sind VIPs” campaign is an initiative of Bertelsmann Stiftung and was launched in conjunction with the 2008 Carl Bertelsmann Prize, which addressed the topic “Integration through Education - Fairness for All.”
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Toronto: Cultural Interpreters for Mental Health
As a mental health cultural interpreter for the Toronto based Afghani community, Julia Ghani sees her work as a form of bridge building: working with the community to build understanding across cultures, generations, language and traditional stereotypes.
Her work is part of a pilot program called “Adopting Mental Health Services for Newcomer Families” designed to address [...]
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Singapore: Tuition Programs for International Students
The Government of Singapore has introduced a Tuition Grant Scheme (TSG), to help international students subsidise the high costs of technical and university education. The policy is part of an overall strategy to both recruit and retain international students to Singapore.
With a population of 4.5 million and an extremely low birth rate, Singapore, needs immigration [...]
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Montreal: Sports hijab helps girls make the team
Controversy has erupted at recent amateur sporting events in Canadian cities over the wearing of the hijab by young female athletes. Newspaper reports tell stories of soccer teams forfeiting the right to play because of the coach’s refusal to withdraw hijab-wearing team members [...]
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Helsinki: Moving international talent from university to employment
Ping Chen, University of Helsinki
As a result of increased international cooperation between universities, the number of foreign degree students in Helsinki and across Finland has grown. Currently, Finland has 11,000 international degree students and aims to increase this to 20,000 students by 2010. Finland’s total national population is just over 5 million.
Attracting international talent [...]
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Toronto: Helping remove the taboo of sex education
Some of the greatest cultural integration challenges happen inside the home and between generations. For many immigrant parents, the idea of sex education for children is not just foreign, its taboo.
“Many newcomers have this impression from the media that Canada is a very open place and kids are taught about sex at a young [...]
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New York: Engaging Newcomers in City Parks
Ricardo Gambetta, Manager of Immigrant Integration Programs at the National League of Cities, shared this green project with us, a “Good Idea We Are Watching:”
Park officials, city planners and immigrant advocates are exploring opportunities to increase usage of city parks among local immigrant communities and seeking ways to incorporate these new residents into the [...]
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