Until now, the textile heritage of minorities has often been the object of abusive cultural appropriation practices undertaken by fashion brands or has been systematically obscured or undervalued as 'non-fashion' produced by 'the other'. With the mass displacement of people on the rise (due to global and local political, economic, and environmental issues), it is clear that we need to rethink and address the needs and aspirations of migrant minority communities and find ways to honour their diverse cultures. Furthermore, to avoid the current situation where designers are 'parachuted' into marginalised or disadvantaged communities with the assumption that bringing their knowledge and expertise is the answer, there is a need to 'decolonise' such dominant approaches, liberating design from its legacies of colonial thought, whilst leveraging the values of diversity, inclusivity and sustainability. This research aims to provide an in-depth understanding of decolonised fashion and textile design practices through the lens of cultural sustainability. Besides the three commonly recognised pillars of sustainability (i.e. environmental, economic, and social), this research argues for a need to consider also a cultural dimension, meaning diverse cultural systems, values, behaviours, and norms. Adopting a holistic approach, this research will focus on textile and fashion artisanal practice carried out by communities of 'diverse locals', meaning refugees who, despite their traumatic journeys, retain their culture, customs and faiths, as well as a variety of invaluable craft heritage skills. This research intends to fill a gap in knowledge through its focus on what refugee communities can teach us, in terms of cultural sustainability, community resilience, and social entrepreneurship. Adopting an embedded and situated approach to designing, participatory action research will be undertaken with communities of refugees living in East London. The research participants will be selected from a variety of cultural backgrounds in light of their past experience working in the textile and fashion industry in their home countries, to leverage their untapped skills and knowledge and facilitate their potential integration in the local economy and society. Oral histories will be collected in relation to the communities' material culture, in order to make sense of their cultural heritage, conduct co-creation workshops aimed at developing social entrepreneurship models to enhance the resilience of the refugees, and outline policy recommendations for sustainable regeneration. It is expected that the research will contribute to raising project participants, design practitioners and researchers' awareness of issues of cultural sustainability, promoting decolonised fashion practice, and recognising diverse forms of entrepreneurship that go beyond traditional standards from the Global North. The research will also benefit the participating communities through amplifying their voice and agency, enhancing their fashion and textile making skills as well as entrepreneurial capabilities, and informing the development of sustainable regeneration policies. Moreover, a collection of fashion and textile artefacts embedding the cultural heritage of the participating communities will be co-created and sold in order to raise funding to support on-going community-led fashion-related entrepreneurial activities. Finally, although the field work will be undertaken with communities in east London, findings from the research will inform the development of a framework for designing for cultural sustainability, social entrepreneurship and sustainable regeneration that is apt to have broader applicability and replicability across the UK.

Adverse direct and indirect impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic will disproportionately fall on individuals and families from poorer backgrounds, those in public facing jobs and living in higher density housing. Tower Hamlets, the site of this study, with its pre-existing stark income and health inequalities is already a high-risk inner city area, placed in one of the richest global cities. This project will focus on the impacts of the lockdown, and its aftermath for the borough's young children, who are likely to experience new health and educational inequalities as a result of the unprecedented restrictions on mobility associated with slowing the spread of COVID-19 introduced on 23 March 2020. Tower Hamlets has a highly diverse population profile, with residents from a wide range of ethnicities and social and economic backgrounds, which offers an opportunity to identify how families deploy their interpersonal, economic and social resources to manage risks associated with living in lockdown and in recovery from lockdown. In close partnership with the borough Public Health and children's services team, we will run a repeat survey of 2000 couple and single parent families with children aged 0-4, and pregnant women; a longitudinal qualitative panel with approximately 60 household members including fathers and wider kin; and examine changing family support services, and emergent community resources such as mutual aid and peer networks. We are interested in families' cultural and inter-personal assets as well as their vulnerabilities: what new forms of managing family and community life have emerged and how are these novel methods helping young children? We will include two groups defined as vulnerable; pregnant women and shielded children. The survey tools chosen are those being run by the concurrent Born in Bradford (BiB) cohort study and by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research offering robust comparisons. Findings will help guide the borough's deployment of scarce resources in the recovery phase of the pandemic and will have relevance to all inner-city areas.

"The context for our project was built from the word 'SANKOFA' ,which, in the Twi language of Ghana translates as ""Go back and get it"". It is a common symbolic concept, to represent the need to reflect on the past to build a successful future. It symbolizes taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge. Since the beginning of human history, stories have been used to transfer knowledge and wisdom, a way of enabling people and societies to learn from the past and from each other. The overall aim of SANKOFA project was to develop resources that would support teachers to build new and improved competences for teaching the complex issues inherent in a globalised world. Project objectives were to:- Promote the use of storytelling by teachers in partner countries, in order to improve children's literacy and oracy skills;- Embed the use of storytelling as an approach for improving children's competences in critical thinking, and their sense of self-efficacy, related to their role as citizens in an interconnected world;- Enhance children's ICT skills through digital techniques;- Enable transnational transfer of knowledge and skills, between teachers and children;- Better equip teachers to support children to improve their intercultural competences for sustainable development.In this project we explored, elaborated, trialled and shared 'Digital Storytelling' as an innovative classroom methodology for enabling children to critically engage with some of the complex issues inherent in a globalised world. The project recognised the need for children and young people (CYP) to have:Digital literacy skills and competencesGlobal competences: developing appropriate pedagogical skills and resources to help prepare children for life and work in a complex globalized world (including increased mobility and integration of ICT). Own-language literacy: increase in reading, writing and oracy skillsThe context for our project was shaped during delivery, due to the Covid pandemic and the shift in all partner countries to online learning for all pupils at various points of the past 12 months. The growth in the use of digital technologies by teachers and pupils has further demonstrated how core these key skills are to education. The pandemic has also demonstrated how globally interdependent we are.Through the 4 project partners, we worked with 40 teachers and 831 children and young people. Teachers and pupils engaged in a series of training and focus group sessions, where the methodology and learning guide provided support for the delivery of the project in the classroom. Teachers and pupils’ experiences helped to shape and inform the toolkit of tried and tested activitiesThe CYP were supported by the teachers and project partners to develop their digital stories based on the project’s overall themes, which link to the SDGs: migration, identity and refugees; biodiversity and ecosystems; responsible consumption; water; active global citizenship; and gender equality.We achieved our goals of producing three intellectual outputs: learning guide, toolkit and website; we feel our Intellectual Outputs exceed initial expectations: both our toolkit and learning guide are high quality publications, with additional content than originally planned. Our website provides additional resources, beyond the intellectual outputs that establishes it as a sustainable resource for teachers long-term. All of our outputs are freely accessible and teachers who have used them to date have been impressed with how useful and supportive they are.All partners have developed new projects or enhanced existing work to include storytelling and digital methodologies as they raise awareness of global issues in the teachers and young people with whom they work. While Covid presented many challenges, it also offered opportunities and added value outcomes- including enhanced resources and outputs."

Context: This project is targeted at children and young people in formal and non-formal settings to retell stories of resilience during COVID 19 in four locations: London, Cumbria, Turkey and Slovenia. With young people at the helm, we will be working to uncover stories of lesser-heard people in our communities, reinterpreting them into arts performances, and touring the work in cultural institutions (theatres, galleries, libraries, heritage sites…) across the four locations. Objectives:- To amplify the voices of those from lesser-heard communities with particular focus on their experiences of COVID 19- To skill up school children in the arts and creative industries towards nurturing an interest in the arts as a viable career option- To uplift cultural organisation hard-hit by COVID 19 by reconnecting them with their communities and drawing audiences to themParticipants: Each partner will work with 20-30 school children from communities with unmet needs depending on our contexts. CDEC will work with young farmers, GLL will work with children living at the intersection of poverty and racialisation, DeM will work with child refugees and Povod will work with the Roma community. Each of our organisations will also partner with three venues where the work will be toured. Activities: The project will work with young people as community leaders through the arts by training them to -- Organise and facilitate workshops with marginalised communities- Conceive, write and produce performances (storytelling or short plays)- Collaborate with cultural organisations by project managing the performances when they go on tourMethodology: This project brings together inclusive pedagogy and experiential learning to create a cycle of knowledge exchange between project partners, cultural organisations, schools and young people. By promoting creative, arts-based education using the real world as our classroom, we envision coproducing with our young people and cultural partners a dynamic learning experience that is relevant and applicable in different contexts. In the spirit of social inclusion, we are interested in exploring what it would look like to build a performances from the bottom up through an inclusive process -- that is, by involving young people who are experts in their own lives leading the gathering and creative process involved in identifying and telling the experiences of the pandemic.Impact: The creative sector which is being heavily hit by COVID will be at the heart of the work, with children and young people drawing audiences to venues through these performances. This will deepen relationships between cultural organisations and local communities with unmet needs. Long term benefit: This project plugs the hole by enthusing a generation of children from deprived backgrounds with the skills, joy and enthusiasm for the arts as a viable career option.

"The recommendation Rec (2006) 19 of the European Council on policy to support positive parenting was adopted in 2006. It recommends that the Member States organize their policies and programs to target the awareness of the value and interest of positive parenting. We aimed with this project PAGE - Parental Guidance and Education - at sharing our work, ideas, methods and practices in the field of parenting support. Our main objective was to contribute to it with our activities and valorisation actions, and even to go beyond that, by focusing on the practices and skills of the professionals, in order to materialize this approach to positive parenting. More precisely, we deplore the fact that today the international conferences or symposia on this topic mainly involve university professors or researchers. Professionals are largely absent from these events, especially social workers, despite the fact that they are the ones that should precisely be informed and trained in these areas. This observation is the basic idea of our project: sharing our practices and building contents DEDICATED to the professionals. Then all along this project, from September 2016 to October 2018, we have* Discussed the issues and challenges we are facing, exchange our good practices, our methods and researches linked to positive parenting,* in order to identify the practices, methods, interesting contents to enrich our viewpoints and our work,* and then develop media and contents for workshops, interventions, case studies,* that we presented during the second year of the project to professionals during 'European Days on supporting positive parenting' organized in four of our countries, France, Italy, Romania and Spain.The partnership brought together:The French association Caminante that gathers in the south west of France several social and medico-social centers of prevention, assistance, support, accommodation, care, sheltered work for persons with physical, mental, psychosocial difficulties of for disabled persons. Caminante was the coordinator of the project and had an academic partner: Anne-Marie Doucet-Dahlgren, a researcher at the Research Centre for Education and Training at the University of Paris Nanterre.2 Romanian partners: AIC University of Iasi and especially the Department of Sociology and Social Work; and Holtis, an association that develops parenting programs int eh North Esat region of Romania, and progressively throuhout Romania.2 Spanish partners: the research group GRISIJ from the University of Barcelona is involved in the areas of vulnerability, social maladjustment and child protection. The Antaviana service of Eduvic association welcomes and supports minor women, pregnant or with newborn children who are away / rejected by their families. 3 Italian partners: the Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology of the University of Verona; Casa di Ramia, an intercultural center of the Town of Verona and LABRIEF, laboratory of research and intervention on family education of the University of Padua. 1 English partner: the African Family Service ""Tower Hamlet"" in London that works on preventing and assessing the vulnerability of migrant families and communities, coming from Africa in particular.Finally our European days gathered 102 participants in Verona, 134 in Barcelona, 139 in Iasi and 271 in Anglet ; mainly professionals in activity, but also students that are future social workers.A specificity of our project was to bring together 'practitioners' (field organisations) and academics. The interest is that the practices of the first ones can feed the work and research of the latter, who also benefit from the experience of the first. It is through interdisciplinary exchange that we developed the skills of professionals who accompany, support, work with children and parents, families in difficulty. All this is about promoting ""harmonious development and child welfare in respect of their fundamental rights and dignity"".Through these European days, we proposed workshops, interventions, case studies etc. which can both guide and train professionals in the field of the support and implementation of parental guidance and positive parenting and provide them with tools to achieve it. The design of a ""handbook of good practices"" on parental guidance at the end of this 2-year project, enables to continue to broadcast in our 5 respective countries the tools and methods of intervention and accompaniment presented during the European Days."