2025 was once again a busy period for us! Some highlights: in January, we made an appearance in Drachten to deliver three workshops on intercultural communication at the Knowledge Day of the AVIM-North Netherlands police unit. AVIM stands for Department of Foreign Nationals, Identification and Trafficking in Human Beings. The invitation for this day was a result of workshops we conducted in Assen last October for chain partners of the Ministry of Justice and Security involved in the reception of asylum seekers in the Northern Netherlands: IND, COA, AVIM, and DT&V.
In April, we hosted the morning plenary session in Druten (Gelderland) and three afternoon workshops for a large regional meeting of Kentalis staff in Nijmegen and the surrounding area. We covered various aspects of intercultural communication and conversation techniques. Kentalis is a national organization specializing in providing education, care, and research for people with hearing or communication impairments. In recent years, we have frequently offered workshops and training sessions for Kentalis schools and institutions, always focusing on communication between Kentalis professionals and non-Dutch parents of children with hearing or communication impairments.
Over the course of the year, we trained a number of groups of neighborhood mediators in the Amersfoort region in intercultural communication and intercultural conflict mediation. This is also something we have done regularly in recent years: in several regions of the country, we have trained teams of (volunteer) neighborhood mediators who regularly deal with problems in neighborhoods where multiple nationalities live together, in conversational skills and recognizing situations.
In May we were guests at the town hall in Apeldoorn as one of the two main speakers at the symposium Relationships in Connection, which was organised by Stimenz, the welfare organisation that carries out a large number of activities in the field of welfare and social cohesion in Apeldoorn, Deventer and surrounding municipalities.
In the Amsterdam region, we have provided workshops for primary school staff on communication with parents with a non-Dutch background. Parents' perception of what they can expect from the school and teachers often differs significantly from what the school itself views as its responsibility. The school, in turn, expects a certain level of commitment from the parents, and this is by no means always clear. Misunderstandings and miscommunication!
This topic was also discussed at a working conference organized by the municipality of Amsterdam at the end of May in the OBA building for preschool and primary education, which we attended. It was also discussed at a webinar hosted in June by De Kempel University of Applied Sciences in Helmond. The webinar, in which Leila Jaffar was interviewed, focused on education professionals from the Eindhoven region, where the student population at schools is changing rapidly and significantly due to the influx of expats coming to work in Eindhoven Brainport, with many students having a non-Dutch background.