From the 15th to the 22nd of September, our president, Ciara and Seeds For Integration Working Group members, Matthew and Matas attended the 20th edition of the University on Youth Development (UYD) in Mollina, Spain, as part of an evaluation seminar of our working group’s progress.

OBESSU are running a 3 pillar grass root project called Seeds for Integration. ‘Seeds’ promotes and advocates the inclusion and integration of migrant, refugee and asylum seeker students in 2nd and 3rd level education across Europe.

ISSU became involved with the project in late 2018, with our working group focusing on the injustices that refugee and asylum seekers face when accessing 3rd level education in Ireland. We successfully ran our ‘Prospects not Provision’ project, with a collaborated conference with MASI due in October in Trinity College.

This year the Evaluation Seminar for our project was held in CEULAJ, Mollina, Spain as part of the UYD. The UYD gathers representatives from different youth organisations and youth movements to discuss, train and be trained around the main issues on the global agenda.

The week consisted of workshops learning how to make communities more intercultural and how asylum seekers, reugees and migrants can become included in society, rather than segregated. We had plentiful representation from student unions across Europe presenting on the ‘Seeds’ project for the project cycle evaluation.

ISSU also propposed an lead a Fridays for Futures Global Strike in Mollina!

Overall, a very productive week for our working group and the three of them came back with an even better motivation to destroy barriers in education for the young people of Ireland.