The project in summary
Art-Therapy sessions for migrant, refugee and asylum seeker children, youths, and adults, located inside the Reception Centers in Andalusia and Greece.
The overall goal of the Art Therapy project is to increase the resilience of the people with a migration background. More specifically, this intervention aims to:
- help people with a migration background to recover from their traumatic experiences, build resilience, regain self-esteem, and integrate into the community;
- leave lasting impact by training local care providers and enable them to implement basic arts therapy techniques in their own practice;
- offer caregivers, exposed to fatigue and secondary trauma through their work, a new and innovative tool to modulate/reduce stress and increase their Self-Care;
- in the long term, integrate the practice of art therapy in the protection and humanitarian assistance programs implemented in migration contexts in Andalusia and Greece.
Beneficiaries (2020-2024)
The project reached a total of 540 people, of which:
- 258 children and adolescents (4-17 ages) with a migration background, of which 45 UAM (16 ages);
- 3 Spanish minors in situation of social vulnerability (16 ages);
- 222 young adults and adults (18-34 ages) with a migration background;
- 52 caregivers (Cruz Roja, CEAR, Fundación SAMU);
- 5 art-therapists.
Between February 2020 and December 2024, The Red Pencil (Europe) in collaboration with Cruz Roja, CEAR, and Fundación SAMU, with Alta Mane support, developed the following activities:
- organized and ran 416 group art-therapy sessions for 261 children and adolescents (4-17 ages) with a migration background, of which 45 UAM (16 ages), and 3 Spanish minors in situation of social vulnerability, and 222 young adults and adults with a migration background, located inside the first and the second line centers in Málaga, Antequera, Sevilla and Granada;
- activated the Arts-Based Capacity Building Training (ACBT) program focused primarily in using Art Therapy as a tool for Staff’s self-care and modulation of stress at work and intended to provide partner staff with new tools using Arts Therapy for enriching their interventions with asylum seekers and refugees, organizing 13 training sessions for 41 caregivers (Cruz Roja and Fundación SAMU);
- organized an introduction to art-therapy reaching 9 caregivers (CEAR);
- organized 9 interdisciplinary meetings attended by 3 art-therapists and 2 caregivers (Cruz Roja);
- trained 5 art-therapists to replicate, in 2024, art-therapy sessions in Antequera, Granada and Sevilla (Andalusia);
- organized supervision sessions (22h) to assist newly trained art-therapists during their intervention;
- modelized and published an Intervention Protocol to replicate, in 2025, art-therapy sessions in Athens (Greece), in collaboration with El Sistema Greece;
- conducted and published the research study « Forcibly displaced adults’ perspectives on change mechanisms after a resilience building art therapy intervention ».
In 2025, intends to consolidate art-therapy interventions inside the Reception Centers run by Cruz Roja (Málaga) and Fundación SAMU (Granada and Sevilla) and replicate them in Athens (Greece) inside the Schisto Refugee Site and the IOM Emergency Accommodation Center for UAM in collaboration with El Sistema Greece. In parallel, foresees to continue the research study on MoCs (Mechanisms of Change) in order to modelize an intervention evidence-based.
