CoRE - Centre of Refugee Empowerment

The CoRE project provided refugees with integrated support to facilitate a positive inclusion in Vienna. With the active contribution of asylum seekers, a one-stop shop, called CoRE centre, was co-designed and refurbished. It was not only used for main services provided by the municipal agencies (education, training, health services, housing counselling, etc.) but also for citizens’ grass-roots initiatives, organised through new forms of social cooperatives. A peer-mentoring scheme was tested (refugees4refugees) in order to recruit and train refugee peers who will then be able to help fellow refugees through the early integration process. Attention was given to the active inclusion of refugees in the labour market, in particular through the development of new mechanisms for skills recognition and enhancement. The CoRE centre hosted an Empowerment Think Tank as well that ensured constant screening and monitoring of the project activities by local and international experts.

During its implementation, the UIA project has capitalised on its experience so that it can be shared with peers. The outputs displayed on this page are the result of this process.