Workshop Tour for children in Dutch refugee camps

Workshop Tour Dutch Refugee Camps

Since 2015, the Move Forward Foundation has been organizing dance and sports workshops for children in Dutch refugee camps. When we started offering dance and basketball activities there was hardly anything for young people.The small children had activities from volunteers in the neighborhood and were satisfied with crafts and other forms of recreation. But the teenagers had almost no activities that matched their interests. By giving them a voice, we found out that in addition to dance and basketball, they like boxing and fitness. Soccer is also popular, of course, but this is usually the first discipline offered by other providers. We have focused on offering the following workshops:

Dance ( most requested are the styles afro / hip hop )

Street Gym ( outdoor fitness with gym equipment ) 

Boxing

Basketball

In emergency shelters and in some refugee camps located on the border of the Netherlands, there are hardly any providers of activities. Our coaches are coming there even if it is a two and a half hour drive to get there. For these little children between 4 and 10 we offer the activity Dance & Games.

Over the years, we have become more ambitious in what we want to achieve through movement for this vulnerable population. For example, our coaches are currently taking training courses in trauma sensitive teaching and we are developing dance and sports exercises together with trauma specialists that have a positive impact on the trauma processing of young people. Not only on a physical level, through movement we also have a trauma soothing effect on the emotional and mental level. For a target group consisting of refugee minors who have often had multiple traumatic experiences, our workshops are approachable, fun and effective.

Basketball workshops were in the minority this workshop tour, this was because few asylum centers and emergency shelters have a basketball ring. But also because the basketball coaches who worked for us have now taken permanent jobs and are less employable. We are now training new coaches through our academy.

We have reached in this project Workshop Tour 2022-2023 over 2200 children living in Dutch Refugee camps and since 2015 more than 16000 children living in Dutch Refugee Camps.

On August 24, 2022, we ended the summer vacation with a Block Party at a very large refugee camp named AZC Budel. There we went with a bus with a DJ, two basketball coaches, a boxing coach, a fitness coach, two dance coaches and a producer. More than 120 children participated in our dance, basketball, boxing and street gym workshops this day. Then they went on to give demonstrations and dance performances of what they had learned and created in these workshops. This under the guidance of our DJ. The asylum center itself provided lemonade and chips this day.  From the question "Will you come again tomorrow?" we can conclude that the children had a great time during our Block Party.

We started a new AZC Workshop Tour in the summer of 2023, because the workshop requests keep coming from many refugee camps and emergency shelters in The Netherlands. So this project will never really ends and we will focus on the impact research in the upcoming project because on that point  we can improve.

Thank you all for making this project possible!