Social regeneration and European affairs

The objectives of the CULMINER project were:

• to overcome disadvantage and exclusion faced by ethnic minority communities in Medway and Grande-Synthe in relation to access to local public services;
• to increase the degree and volume of access by local ethnic minority communities to public services in the social care and employment fields, delivered in an appropriate, culturally sensitive manner;
• to recruit, train and employ a cross-border team of cultural mediators, located in Medway and Grande-Synthe, to co-ordinate and instigate a series of cross-border cultural mediation actions and recommendations related to the social care and employment sectors;
• to deliver cultural awareness training, through the cultural mediators, to local care services and employment services staff, so that they become aware of the specific cultural needs of ethnic minorities as recipients of their services;
• to promote social care and employment guidance as a profession to ethnic minorities to encourage an increased number of employees in the care sector from the ethnic minority communities;
• to undertake specific actions to change the nature of care services provision and employment guidance provision, to make them more culturally sensitive.

The CULMINER project was inspired by the previous work done on the AVANCE project. The project was part funded by the Interreg IIIA Programme and Measure 3 and project partners were:

• Maison de L’Initiative, Grande-Synthe, France (lead partner);
• The Vines Centre Trust;
• Centre Medico-Psychologique;
• Agence Nationale Pour l’Emploi.

The project achieved the following outputs and impact (UK side only):

• the appointment of four cultural mediators (two in Medway);
• the delivery of cultural awareness training to six social care organisations and three employment guidance organisations;
• access to employment guidance services for the first time for 25 people from ethnic minority communities;
• the delivery of six changes to social care and employment guidance services to take into account improved cultural awareness;
• three workshop consultation sessions with ethnic minority communities on progress with improving cultural awareness;
• the achievement of an 80 per cent satisfaction rate with CULMINER following a survey of ethnic minorities;
• five jobs gained by people from ethnic minority communities as a consequence of their work with employment guidance services;
• 20 jobs gained by people from ethnic minority communities in the social care sector following the CULMINER project.

^ (back to top)