Introduction

This year the region of Västernorrland is sending two youth ambassadors. I am one of the lucky two!

My name is Louise and I went to Region Sörmland last year to attend to the academy back then.

I loved it! 

Especially the theme green efficiency gave me a lot of inspiring thoughts throughout the week and I am looking forward to hear more about how other regions work on integration and multicultural developing. This is one of my favorite topics since I studied social science and is engaged in organizations working with human rights and global justice.  I like to travel to meet new people because I like to learn new things about cultures and to be inspired by other personalities. 

I hope that I will get the chance to grow in the meeting with new people during our stay in Serbia, Vojvodina.

photo: Private

As a part of our preparation before the AER summer academy this year I and David visited the The County Administrative Board. They are responsible for the establishment of new citizens in Sweden. They are working actively in our region to cooperate with the municipalities and to create a better social environment for all people.

We met two very kind people called Runa and Assar who both work as developers of integration.  They gave us an introduction and filled our backpack with information about how our region is working with multicultarism, multi-ethnicity and mulilingualism. They told us about their works and the projects they run together with many other officials. The basic principle behind all of their work is to “to improve the establishment of new citizens in the region of Västernorrland”

One good example they told us about is a project called “SOSOV”, which is a project in civil orientation and language education for new citizens. Inside the project they educate communicators already established citizens born in other countries to teach about civic in their own languages to new citizens who speak the same language as they do.

Photo: http://www.informationsverige.se/Svenska/Samhalle/Sidor/Att-komma-till-Sverige.aspx

They also told us about their project with the website Information Swedish . 

The website is a portal that has been created to make the arrival in Sweden much easier. The site is intended to give answers about Swedish society and which authorities you will come into during the first time in Sweden. It will answer questions like: how do I find a home? What are the rules where I live?

The portal has been built with the help of other newly arrived people so that it will be understood by the people who the information is intended to reach. The site is written in Swedish, Somali, English, French, Arabic, Dari, Persian, and Tigrinya. This is a really good site so if we have any readers interested in moving to Sweden or doing something similar to “information Sweden”, or just curios ones, go see the site!

To be continued.