Project CHAMPIONs’ central action is to establish permanent offline working groups – ‘CHAMPIONs Roundtables’ – bringing together first-line practitioners (FLPs) of different disciplines, professions, institutions and agencies, to jointly develop effective detection and response solutions to counter polarization, build resilience, and protect vulnerable groups in their local communities. The project will be implemented in four pilot countries: Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Germany.

The offline approach is complemented and supported by a centrally developed platform tool and service package. This online platform will combine three central instruments:

  1. Alert – a platform that provides the functionalities in order to allow and support FLPs during the overall generation process of a “case of interest”;

  2. Arena – a platform that provides the functionalities to allow and support the establishment of specific groups of experts for each specific “Case of interest”, in order to collaborate on it towards the identification of possible solutions;

  3. Training Yard – a capacity-building resource center which FLPs can engage with either individually or as a group, complete with learning materials, video-tutorials, good practice guidelines and handbooks and case study simulation exercises developed through the project action.

The long-term aim of the project is to transfer this pilot model to communities across the EU where other FLP Roundtables are established and become users of the developed platform. To achieve this, synergies with related EU-funded projects, platforms and networks will be harnessed throughout the project and after its implementation period.

Dr. Catherine Lourdes Dy is the Coordinator of the CHAMPIONs project. For more information please click the ‘contact us’ button.