Sustainable Global Technologies Studio, Aalto University
Team Members; Ko Ai, Andrea Cuesta, Nele Korhonen, Kelly Purcell, Joseph Savage, Anu Vehmaa

Project Summary

LIFT Athens is a humanitarian project developed by a multidisciplinary team of six students as part of Sustainable Global Technologies studio course at Aalto University in Spring 2017. The project aims to respond to the ongoing refugee crisis in Greece, similarly to the first LIFT project in 2016 that was conducted on the island of Lesvos. This year, the project focus moved to mainland Greece as a response to the influx of refugees relocating there frotm the islands.

The team was given the aim to create a positive impact in the lives of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece in collaboration with Finn Church Aid. The organization’s new education program with a Greek NGO, Elix, set a base for promoting life skills, especially to teenagers at risk for being left out of the system. Empowering young displaced people became the objective of the project after background research and expert interviews.
Analysis and needs assessment lead to various workshop ideas but when the team learned about a Finnish peer-teaching methodology called Koulu School, the decision to use it was easy as it fit the project and the objective perfectly, and developing it was seen as a way to contribute to something bigger than LIFT. The open source method was originally created by researchers from Demos Helsinki and Aalto University and has developed as it is tested in different environments. The LIFT Athens team was the first to adapt and use the method with minors as well as with asylum seekers and refugees. This was done through workshops in different contexts: in learning centers in Athens with both Finn Church Aid and Elix as well as at a refugee camp with the NGOs, Lighthouse Relief and I AM YOU.

The workshops reached 53 young displaced people in total. These teenagers were accustomed to a more traditional schooling system and introducing a co-creational method was new and challenging but once they stepped out of their comfort zones they gained self-confidence, as they realized what skills and knowledge they have and what they are capable of. They learned not only peer-teaching but also presenting, communication and team building skills, and alternative ways of learning.

Using the Koulu School Methodology was a step in developing it further to meet the needs of a multicultural and multilingual context. The findings were shared directly with those originally behind the Method and turned into a package that has everything for conducting Koulu School Workshops in said context. The full report and guidebook was delivered to all the partners of the project and is available on the LIFT Athens website.

Download the full report (pdf)