Building Bridges Toolkit

The Toolkit was designed to collect and share the know-how on voluntary projects involving people seeking or who have recently found refuge, as well as raising awareness on forced migration in general. The collection of guidelines, methods and case studies is non-exhaustive and should simply foster your own inspiration and support you in implementing projects on the topic. The creation of the Toolkit has been driven by the ever bigger need of the international SCI network to exchange best practices on projects in the field. It was coordinated by SCI Switzerland with the support of Útilapu Hungary. Its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Mercator Foundation Switzerland and the active contribution of the Building Bridges working group and a number of SCI branches.

METHODS AND TOOLS serve to support your work on the topic of refugees and migration with different target groups.

GLOBAL WEALTH

Interactive game on wealth distribution

Time needed: 1 hour

Objectives / aim: Make people think about wealth distribution, population distribution and refugees› movements

Level of Difficulty: easy

Resources needed:

  • One chair for each participant
  • Broad space 
  • One narrator 
  • The charts with the numbers (find them in the link below)

Number of participants: 10-40 and narrator

Contact / Source: Alessandra alepap@sci.gr

The concept of this activity is that participants are first pushed to think about their idea of wealth distribution, population distribution and refugees› movement all over the planet and later they discover the real numbers according to official data.

Steps:

1. Divide the space into 5 continents: ASIA, AFRICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, NORTH AMERICA. Ask the participants to put themselves (no chairs yet) in the continents according to what they think it is the distribution of population. Then give them the real numbers (according to the numbers in the link). Tell them to remember where they have been placed.

2. Give one chair to each participant: ask them to put them in the 5 continents according to what they think is the WEALTH distribution in the planet. Then give them the solution (according to the numbers in the link). Then ask them to sit on the available chairs according to the continent where they belonged before (Phase 1).

3. Finally ask people to be refugees and position themselves in the continents according to what they think it is the number of hosted refugees in each continent. Then correct (according to the numbers in the link).

Tips:

  • Try to stimulate participants to think how different is the common opinion on such themes, compared to what it is the reality.   
  • Be informed about theoretical migration and refugees issues, in order to give some answers to the questions that participants may rise.

Links:

CONTRIBUTE!

You can share your experience, observations, tips and tricks, pictures etc. by uploading for instance a method or a case study to the Building Bridges Toolkit. As this Toolkit is a work in progress to which all involved parties are invited to contribute, we would also be very grateful for your support and contribution in order to inspire others to continue the work towards peace and intercultural understanding.