European and UK Partners

ASAP

From 2005-2007 Bridges was involved in a European Transnational Partnership involving five other European states under the ESF funded EQUAL Community Initiative. The ASAP Partnership consisted of: Scotland; Finland; Poland; Lithuania; Italy and Austria.

Bridges was involved in two distinct projects developing an Empowerment Toolkit for those working with asylum seekers and developing a model for accredited qualifications for those working with asylum seekers and refugees in Europe. Publications relating to both projects can be found on our Publications Page.

Bridges developed two SQA accredited qualifications for people working with asylum seekers and refugees as a result of this work which are now being delivered in Scotland.

IMPART

www.impart.eu

Since 2009 Bridges has been a member of the IMPART partnership (Improving Participation of Migrants in the Workplace), with partners in Germany, Flanders, Spain, England, Sweden, Greece and Estonia, looking at:

1) Accreditation of qualifications and experience for migrant workers and refugees and how to build capacity for agencies supporting these groups.

2) Fostering anti-discrimination practices in the workplace

3) Integrated Territorial approaches

Bridges sits on the working group looking at Fostering anti-discrimination practices led by European Social Fund Agency of Flanders and in 2010 hosted a successful Peer Review, from across the network, to review the Bridges approach to fostering anti-discrimination.

The partnership is led by the Commission for Integration and Migration of the Berlin senate www.integrationsbeauftragter.berlin.de and in 2010 Maggie Lennon, Director of Bridges was on secondment to the Commission for five weeks supporting the partnership and drafting their plans to mainstream their work.

In addition to our transnational work funded by the European Commission, Bridges is asked regularly to share its practice with European and world partners and has presented the work of the company at conferences and seminars in Greece, Sweden, Berlin, England and Poland and has hosted projects from Norway, Finland, Denmark, France (The Reunion Islands), Australia and New Zealand.

Our Best practice Guide has been widely disseminated across Europe.

We are currently hosting a young German student who is studying a Masters  Degree in Russian, Central and East European Studies at Glasgow University. Sarah is completing a collaboraive dissertation with us researching the aspirations and experiences of professional Russian women migrants in Glasgow.

In August our team was joined by Margrethe a Masters student in International Migration and Ethnic Relations from Denmark, conducting research into our Womens Programme.

If you would like any further information about our European work or are looking for new European partners, please contact Maggie Lennon, Director at the office in Govan, 00 44 (0) 141 445 4464; maggielennon@bridgesprogrammes.org.uk

UK

Bridges works in association with many organisations in the UK and has presented its practice at numerous conferences. We work very closely with the London based policy based organisation the Employability Forum www.employabilityforum.co.uk and has spoken at several of their conferences and events; we are currently working with them on a project to support Finance professionals.