RAISD D7.1 Research stories from Action Research Units

The main goal of this deliverable is to collect relevant information and witnesses about the co-creation process which led the RAISD project partners to set up the Action Research Units (known as ARUs) and to implement the Tailored Attention Inclusion Strategies (in short, TAIS): on the basis of the collected information, some conclusions were drawn about the main challenges faced by the partners, including both the successful and the improvable aspects of the project. In order to do that, the UNIMED team, leading the corresponding task of the workplan, collected and analysed information from various sources: in the first place, the team went through the many deliverables produced by the partners reporting on the activities they performed in the first two years of the project’s lifetime, and then a set of interviews were carried out at two levels: At the partnership level, the UNIMED team interviewed the ARU leaders, to understand the main challenges they faced and to plan the second level of interviews; At the ARUs level, external stakeholders participating in the ARUs different from the project partners, as well as some final beneficiaries were interviewed to collect external views about the work of the ARUs and the impact of the TAIS. Of course the project was very hardly hit by the COVID 19 pandemic which completely jeopardised the timing of the activities and in some cases even their feasibility, and the way in which the ARUs reacted to this unforeseen event and showed resilience was one of the important issues at stake in the information collection process. On this basis the Deliverable D7.1 is structured as follows: In the introductory sections of the document, some background information about the project as such, the organisation of work and the way the work has been carried out is provided; Then the goals of the deliverable and the methodology adopted to fulfil these goals (such as, inter alia, the two-level interview structure) a presented; The bulk of the document is then represented by seven sections, one for each ARU, where the ARU stories are told, and links are provided to the video recording of some of the interviews. Due to the severe privacy and personal security regulations and RAISD measures for protecting forcibly displaced people, some of the persons involved could not have their identities made public and therefore not all the interviews could be video recorded. In these cases, an anonymised transcription was provided. Otherwise, an informed consent was obtained. In the last paragraph some conclusions are drawn, essentially focussing on: The many difficulties of involving and keeping the levels of engagement of the stakeholders (problems in finding the right motivation, avoiding withdrawal) and the final beneficiaries (providing them with added value when participating in the activities); The impact of the pandemic and how the ARUs reacted to that, especially considering that, dealing with vulnerable groups, turning the activities into online events was not always a viable option; And finally, some considerations on the overall achievements of the ARU and on their innovation contents