The EU promotes the active inclusion and full participation of disabled people in society, in line with the EU human rights approach to subject. Disability is a rights issue and not a matter of politeness in line with UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The European Commission’s European Disability Strategy 2010-2020, adopted in 2010, builds on the UNCRPD. A Progress Report presenting the achievements, up to 2016, on the implementation of the Strategy has been published in February 2017.
The EU Disability Strategy decided 8 priority areas to reach targets. These are accessibility, participation, equality, employment, education and training, social protection, health and external action. Achieving these goals will be to enable people with disabilities to participate more in social activities. Especially, dedicated efforts to physical and mental development of young and children will produce comprehensive and socially beneficial results. With this regard, EU supports these efforts by funding them in a different ways. One of the prominent funding opportunity is Erasmus + Strategic Partnership Action which is known as KA2.
Strategic Partnerships allow for the preparation of projects for different target groups in the fields of school education, higher education, youth, vocational education and adult education. You can develop a strategic partnership project with the cooperation of 3 different institutions from at least 3 different program countries in time periods from 1 to 3 years. You can produce free tools and innovative outcomes for the use of young people with disabilities in related themes, which you think it is a problem at the local and EU level. Moreover, you can include staff who work in this field and the target audience into international mobilities to see good practices in situ.
The good example for that is VR 4 Inclusion Youth KA2 Project which is conducted by the cooperation of our experts Tufan Adıgüzel, Mariusz Stepien and Oğuz Tutal. Within this context, three different Virtual Reality (VR) games as well as complementary social inclusion program will be produced for the use of young people whose spinal cord injuries. After tested with the participation of target group in internationally, outputs will be disseminated. At the same time, different institutions from Greece, Turkey and Poland have the opportunity to get information about each other’s works and good practices, and to transfer innovation. Detailed information about the project can be found at www.vr4inclusion.org.
If you have an idea and want to take action, please contact us, we will start to work without losing time. To get information about KA2 projects, you can look for the commission’ website.
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