Home - Vocal in Need

If you are a member of security staff working as police, border guard or at the entrance point of a shelter for migrants and refugees the VOCAL IN NEED resources can help you to interact better with migrants, refugees and other foreign nationals who don’t speak your language.

If you are a job coach / counsellor / educator / trainer working for an NGO or a non-profit organisation, the VOCAL IN NEED resources might help you to overcome language and cultural challenges when dealing with migrants and refugees in situations where otherwise the help of an interpreter would be necessary.

If you are the manager of an agency offering services for migrants and refugees the VOCAL IN NEED online tools can help your staff to improve their communication skills when dealing with people with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

About the project

The recent refugee crisis and increasing mobility of people from EU member states and from other parts of the world, poses a great challenge to security and agencies who are confronted with people with different cultural backgrounds and who don’t speak the local language. The VOCAL IN NEED project aims at bridging this linguistic and cultural gap by providing an online training course and an app for smartphones to better interact with migrants and refugees in the following contexts:

Police offices, border control;
Shelters / residential centres for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers;
Agencies that provide training, employment or other services for migrants and refugees

The partnership has identified the following situations where language and intercultural competences of security and agency staff should be improved:

On the road (traffic);
Reporting an incident (police station);
At the shelter / residential center for migrants and refugees (NGOs);
In the integration course / employment service (agencies).

Expected results

The VOCAL IN NEED partners will develop the following products during the project lifetime:

Needs analysis

in partner countries to understand the training needs of security and agency staff and to design an online training course based on real-life scenarios where they feel their language and intercultural competences are not sufficient;

Online training modules

accessible from any device and developed to be user-friendly , containing vocabulary, useful phrases, scenarios/virtual tours, exercises and cultural information;

App for smartphones

(Mobile assistant) containing useful key phrases and words (with respective audio recording in foreign languages) to help security and agency staff in overcoming language barriers. It will operate as a valuable resource to improve understanding.

The VOCAL IN NEED training modules will be available in the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, English, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, Turkish.