Experience exchange in Jelgava
– CeMeWe partners strengthen cooperation on integration of immigrant women
Text and photos by Ilze Lujāne, PR-specialist for Zemgale Planning region
A three-day experience exchange took place in Jelgava, where the Zemgale Planning Region hosted partners from Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia from the project ” Central Baltic Mentoring for Migrant Women seeking Employment” (CeMeWe) to organise not only further work but also to do a valuable activity together with immigrant women.
A lot has been accomplished in three days – the work of the ZPR and Jelgava have been introduced, the project’s progress and next steps have been discussed, and several valuable meetings have taken place with people who work with the integration of immigrants in their professional work or in their daily life. Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies, Zemgale Region Human Resource and Competences Development Centre, as well as the “Public Center” of the Jelgava state city municipality were visited, where a meeting was held with the coordinator of the Ukrainian civilian population Laina Damberga, the representatives of the One-Stop Agency Guna Salceviča and Snežana Zenovjeva, as well as the Ukrainian cultural center “Džerelo ” representative Marina Auzina.
An important contribution to the partners’ meeting was a workshop with immigrant women who participated in the activity “Gigamapping”, led by Hilkka Lydén, project manager for the whole CeMeWE project and a specialist at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. The “Gigamapping” method allows you to see previously unnoticed connections, to look at what is happening outside the usual framework, and the obtained information will further serve as research and knowledge material. Women from Ukraine were asked to put their emotions, feelings and experiences about the “stakeholders” in their lives, opportunities and obstacles in the labour market on about two metres long sheet of paper. Once the first part of the task was done, the connections between the information were sought with coloured threads representing potential risks, conflicts, collaboration, official relationships, missing connections and barriers.
The participants described the method as an opportunity to think outside the box, combine different experiences together and see their thoughts on paper connected in one chain. Women said that in this method of situational analysis, the big picture can be put together like a jigsaw puzzle – piece by piece.
Some of the insights expressed by the Ukrainian women: it is difficult at the beginning, but it gets easier later – you have to be able to answer the question why try to build a life here; it is very easy to help others if you are willing; it is more comfortable to complain than to do; gratitude for the services received for different life situations. The workshops were a good start to understanding the complexity of local, regional and European systems that affect the integration of migrant women. The opportunity to bring together the views of different stakeholders and the multiple perspectives of women was particularly useful.
“The work was creative and we worked well across language barriers. I am very grateful that the participants shared their frustration and sadness as well as their joy and happiness. I also thought that some of the visual symbols evoked strong feelings, such as the detail of the torn family picture. There is so much symbolism and nuance that I am really looking forward to working with the material. This is a new tool for me, and deciphering the different languages and visuals will definitely be an exciting challenge. I will probably digitise this data and use artificial intelligence to look at these links from a different perspective. Next, work will continue on a new visual representation that will incorporate and merge the data, where members of other working groups will try to fill in the missing parts and possibly gain further insights,” comments Hilkka Lydén from Laurea University of Applied Sciences.
Ieva Zeiferte, CeMeWe project manager for Zemgale Planning Region, evaluates the partner meeting: “I think we are off to a good start in the integration work with refugees and foreign students in the region. The Nordic experience, knowledge and methods were very well appreciated by the target groups, the support providers and the implementers of integration activities. For multilateral cooperation, the in-depth learning of methods is certainly a valuable tool that should be continued in the future.”
