Workshop Tour for children in Dutch refugee camps

The Move Forward Foundation has been organizing dance and sports workshops for children in Dutch asylum seekers' centers for 9 years. When we started offering dance and basketball activities, there was hardly anything for teenagers.The small children had activities from volunteers and were satisfied with crafts and other forms of recreation. By giving the teenagers a saying, 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 parties. We have focused this year on offering the following workshops for the teenagers:

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

- Street Gym ( outdoor fitness with gym equipment )

- Boxing

- Basketball

In emergency shelters and in some asylum centers located in the far corners of the Netherlands there are no or hardly any providers of activities. Our coaches will go there as well. Because there is little to do in these places for small children there too, we offer for ages 4 to 9:

Dance & Games

Over the years, we wanted to make more impact and got more ambitious in what we want to achieve through movement for this vulnerable population. For example, our coaches are currently taking trainings 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 childrefugees who have often had multiple traumatic experiences, our workshops are approachable, fun and effective.

We managed to give 170 workshops , 63 dance workshops , 38 street gym , 47 boxing , 22 basketball this year.

Links:

• http://www.moveforward.org