Call for Participants: Practitioner Exchange Programme

The Practitioner Exchange Programme is a new deliverable for RAN, which is aimed to support and target practitioners at an individual professional level, rather than a group level. This programme provides practitioners with the opportunity of visiting the local context of another practitioner and follow their activities, in order to learn from each other in a smaller setting than RAN working group meetings.

Key Features

• To ensure an optimal exchange, exchanges will be, as a rule, limited to one-to-one settings. In justified cases, the Commission can raise the number to maximum 3 practitioners visiting each other.
• Exchanges will take place primarily between practitioners of different EU Member States.
• The duration will be of maximum one working week, ideally 3-5 working days. This programme is aimed to take place between September and December 2022.
• RAN will cover travel, accommodation and a daily allowance of the visiting practitioner.

Target audience

The target audience for this programme are practitioners, primarily based in EU Member States, with:

• a professional profile that has a coordinating role in the development of local preventive actions and plans (in particular the preventive coordinator of a city)
• a professional that is developing and/or carrying out specific aspects of the local response to radicalisation (such as social workers, youth workers, educators, police, community workers, psychologists/psychiatrists etc.).

This professional should be in charge of preventing and/or countering violent radicalisation as a main field of work or a strong field of competence. The direct contact with (potentially) radicalised people is not always necessary, e.g. if the practitioner has a coordinating role or is supervising a team of first-line-practitioners or is in charge of developing a specific response (like a communication plan for returnees, e.g.).

Possible topics for exchange

• Multi-agency cooperation and models
• Exit work
• Community empowerment
• Local actions plans
• Involvement of young actors
• Development of prevention work
• Information sharing protocols
• P/CVE evaluation methods

Application procedure

To apply for the programme, please find the application template. The application period will be open until 24 July. For specific questions related to the Practitioner Exchange Programme, please contact Feline Deniz, Boy Broeders or Pomme Woltman here.

Selection process

After the application procedure is closed, practitioners are selected and matched to suitable partners. Key criteria that will be taken into account when selecting and matching them are:

• participants are practitioners;
• participants work in the same field, do comparable working activities and share similar responsibilities to make sure that they use the learnings in their day-to-day work;
• participants are based in EU Member States;
• participants are not based in the same EU Member State;
• participants agree and commit to the framework and information-sharing conditions of the programme;
• participants share a mutual language to facilitate exchange;
• participants have compatible learning priorities;
• a first come, first serve principle.

The nature of the exchanges is flexible: if a practitioner hosts an exchange visit, they may also go on an exchange visit themselves. Practitioners do not have to visit others after they have hosted, but they should be willing to host others if they have visited someone themselves. This exchange can be with one of the practitioners that visited them, but also with another practitioner.

Once a match is proposed by RAN, practitioners will be linked with each other to discuss the exchange, their learning objectives and to check if they consider that this match will allow them to meet these objectives. After this, both practitioners need to agree on the match. If one of the practitioners or both conclude that they are not a suitable pairing, a new match is proposed. A maximum of 3 matching attempts will be made per practitioner.

Concept note and programme

The participating practitioners commit to draft, with the support of RAN, a concept note which contains the programme of their personal exchange and possibly an assignment.

Collecting experiences and lessons learned

After the exchange, RAN staff will share a written testimony template with both practitioners to follow-up on the lessons learned from the visit and their learning experience, and give feedback on the programme assignment. The testimony will be included in RAN newsletters and can be disseminated via the RAN communication channels. In addition, RAN Staff will organise an online meeting with all participants of this programme, with the purpose to foster exchange of their experiences and lessons learned.