Faros Horizon Center Design Training Program for Refugee Youth: 2019-2024

Publication | Nov 22, 2024 | Martha Thompson

Executive summary

In 2017, Faros, an NGO in Athens, Greece, had been running a shelter and drop-in center for unaccompanied refugee minors (UAMs) and refugee youth for a couple of years. They knew firsthand the mental and emotional toll on these young people who had crossed the Mediterranean to Greece as asylum seekers. When MIT D-Lab approached Faros about offering a participatory design workshop for the young refugees, Faros was ready to embrace design education as an innovative approach to serving refugee youth.

Faros was interested in an alternative way to look beyond the vulnerability of youth to see their potential. D-Lab thought that Creative Capacity Building (CCB), a participatory design curriculum developed at D-Lab in 2009, could provide these youth with skills to make things they could use and give them a grounding for vocational training. Both organizations felt that the outcomes for participants in CCB workshops in other countries could be achieved for refugee youth and would help catalyze their creativity and potential; enhance their confidence, resilience, and agency; and teach them problem solving and teamwork — all of which could help them navigate their futures.

The first CCB training that D-Lab led with Faros in Athens in 2017 had a transformative impact on the 15 refugee youths who participated, convincng Faros and D-Lab to collaborate on developing a longer-term program. Velux Foundations’ grant to Faros in 2019 made it possible to establish the Horizon Center that year and launch a five-year program to teach design and vocational skills to refugee youth and UAMs. Faros ran the center, providing a safe space for youth, and connection to a wide array of services, and support. MIT D-Lab developed the curricula, trained Faros staff as design and technical instructors, led specialized workshops on site with MIT staff and students, and continued to develop new content and modules.

The program began in 2019, at the height of the crisis of UAMs in Greece, when 5,000 youth were overwhelming the vastly inadequate services and supports available to them. They faced challenges meeting their most basic needs for food and shelter; they had suffered trauma, abuse and violence on the journey; and were subject to abuse and exploitation in Greece.

Over the five years of the project, two major drivers divided the project into three separate time periods, each with its own programmatic foci and slightly different subgroups within the refugee youth population. One driver was changes in the situation of refugee youth and UAMs during the life of the program because of geopolitics and attempts to stem migration to Europe. In 2024, the refugee youth and UAMs are a significantly smaller, more stable, and better supported population than they were in the crisis of 2019. The pandemic was the other major force shaping the program, closing the Horizon Center the second year of the project and forcing the staff to redesign the program.

In 2019, the overall project goal was to keep the UAM and refugee youth from getting lost in exploitation, depression, and neglect by providing a new kind of training that offered hard and soft skills. The Horizon Center Design Program combined design and vocational training, while connecting the youth to an array of support and services. The curriculum had a transformational impact on the young refugees who participated, noticeably changing behaviors, enhancing confidence, and shifting mindsets, while giving them vocational skills. However, it was hard to measure the depth and extent of these impacts since the yourths saw Greece as a way station and their transience meant no single cohort completed the six-to-nine month program in the first year.

The closure of the in-person program during the pandemic forced D-Lab and the Horizon Center staff to rework the original curriculum into a virtual, and eventually hybrid, program called the Toolbox program. At the request of other NGOs, the Horizon Center ran this virtual program in 11 shelters for 314 UAMs who were in more stable and supported situations than many of those who had attended the first year. The aim was to keep these youth tethered to some kind of educational experience that would keep them engaged in learning during the isolation of lockdowns and increase their confidence in their abilities. There was a 90% participation rate in these virtual classes and high numbers of participants joined the Horizon Center when it reopened in 2023.

The final iteration of the design program post- pandemic was divided into two tracks. The Design Process Essentials courses taught technical skills to solve a design challenge and served as an introductory experience for the broader population of refugee youth. Design Your Future was a program focused on job readiness and integration for older, motivated youth with certain qualifications who wanted to study or work in Greece. This was a highly successful program graduating five cohorts of a total of 81 youth, who aquired technical skills and teamwork experience and reported improved behavior, mindset, and confidence — all helping move them toward job readiness.

The tangible, quantifiable results from the program were as follows:

6 sets of curricula developed: Activity Classes, Basic Training, Introduction to Design (levels 1, 2, and 3), the Toolbox program, Design Process Essentials, and Design Your Future.
4 D-Lab student-led workshops: two in August 2019, one in January 2020, and one in January 2024.
24 D-Lab students sent to Greece to co-lead the workshops.
12 Horizon Center staff trained by D-Lab as design and technical instructors.
819 youth participated in the program:
242 in Year 1 in Activity Classes, Basic Training, and Introduction to Design
314 in hybrid and virtual trainings in Years 2 and 3, including Advanced Design
81 in Design Your Future in Years 4 and 5
212 in Design Process Essentials in Years 4 and 5

The intangible results of the program were harder to quantify. Overall, income generation and job readiness were not significant outcomes of the program, except for the Design Your Future program in the last two years. Originally, Faros and D-Lab had envisioned that the vocational skills part of the program would lead to those outcomes, but the determination of the refugee youth to travel through Greece to Western Europe, the legal barriers to income generation, and lack of a skills accreditation process posed persistent challenges to achieving these goals.

The most significant outcomes of the program were the most intangible: the transformation around behavior, mindsets, and confidence, and expanding the youths’ horizons. D-Lab and Faros staff were extremely agile in being reworking the program three times to respond to the crisis of vulnerable youth in 2019, the restrictions of the pandemic, and the need to support youth who were staying in Greece post-pandemic. Although the depth and extent of the transformation were hard to measure given the youths’ transitory status in Greece, many participants went on to education and employment, and shared how the program changed their image of themselves and expanded their horizons. Faros and D-Lab’s original vision — that a combination of design and technical training could help vulnerable youth in a precarious situation believe in their own potential — turned out to be fundamentally correct.