The project in summary

Art-Therapy sessions for migrant, refugee and asylum seeker children, youths, and adults, located inside the Reception Centers in Spain, Greece and Belgium.

 

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 Spain, Greece, and Belgium.

Beneficiaries (2020-2025)

The project reached a total of 686 people, of which:

  • 346 minors and teenagers (4-17 ages) with a migration background, including 99 UAM (15-16 ages);
  • 3 Spanish minors in situation of social vulnerability (16 ages);
  • 242 young adults and adults (18-35 ages) with a migration background;
  • 86 caregivers (Cruz Roja, CEAR, Fundación SAMU, IOM Greece, et METAdrasi);
  • 9 art-therapists.

Between February 2020 and December 2025, The Red Pencil (Europe) in collaboration with Cruz Roja, CEAR, and Fundación SAMU in Spain, and with IOM Greece and METAdrasi in Greece, with Alta Mane support, developed the following activities:

  • organized and ran 539 group art-therapy sessions for 346 minors and teenagers (4-17 ages) with a migration background, including 99 UAM (15-16 ages), and 3 Spanish minors in situation of social vulnerability, and 242 young adults and adults with a migration background, located in Spain inside the first and the second line centers in Málaga, Antequera, Sevilla and Granada, and in Greece, inside two Emergency Accommodation Centers for UAM managed by IOM Greece in Athens, and an Independent Living House for UAM managed by METAdrasi in Athens;
  • 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 25 training sessions for 75 caregivers (Cruz Roja, Fundación SAMU, IOM Greece, and METAdrasi);
  • organized an introduction to art-therapy reaching 9 caregivers (CEAR);
  • organized 17 interdisciplinary meetings attended by 3 art-therapists and 2 caregivers (Cruz Roja);
  • trained 9 art-therapists to replicate art-therapy sessions in Antequera, Granada and Sevilla (Andalusia), and in Athens (Greece);
  • modelized and published an Intervention Protocol to replicate art-therapy sessions in various migration contexts in Europe;
  • conducted and published the research study « Forcibly displaced adults’ perspectives on change mechanisms after a resilience building art therapy intervention »;
  • launched a collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid to pursue the Pilot Study on Mechanisms of Change in young adults with a migration background.

In 2026, also with the support of Alta Mane, RPE aims to consolidate its art-therapy interventions in Spain, in collaboration with Cruz Roja (Málaga) and Fundación SAMU (Granada and Sevilla), and in Greece, in collaboration with IOM Greece and METAdrasi (Athens), and in parallel to replicate them in Belgium, in collaboration with Fedasil. At the same time, with the Complutense University of Madrid as its academic partner, intends to finalize the Pilot Study on Mechanisms of Change and to replicate it with unaccompanied minors contributing to the research on the effectiveness of art-therapy and to the establishment of a Theory of Change.

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