“The Missing Link – increasing social inclusion by engaging experts by experience” aims at developing tools to improve training and employment of the “Experts by Experience” (EE). The project is based on the belief that everybody who has experienced an exclusion situation can improve the inclusion of the socially excluded thanks to acquired attitudes and skills. Therefore, the EE’s contribution must be regarded as equally important as the contribution of experts by training. The final purpose of this project is to compensate for a missing link between the people who suffer from exclusion and the non-excluded.
The project is the result of a European cooperation between four partners with backgrounds in psychiatry (FOKUS-Bremen, IGPB-Amsterdam, Fontys Hogeschool- Eindhoven and GIP-SoFIa) and two partners with poverty and migration backgrounds (De Link-Brussels and Moinho- Lisbon) and it is funded with the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme (2009-2011). In the framework of the project a European Charter of “The Missing Link” was drafted in order to demand Europe to acknowledge, disseminate and support methodology of this project, including the innovative role of the EE.