The focus of the ENSURE Interreg 2 Seas project has been on breaking the cycle of disadvantage that prevents vulnerable people from being socially included. 

The ENSURE partnership contained several social and healthcare partners and non-governmental organisations from Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK. The project beneficiaries were diverse in composition, including parties that target a variety of groups, namely: young migrants, refugees and status holders, people with another ethnic background than the country of habituation, young adults with autism, care avoiders, people on welfare, non-accompanied minors, foster children and foster families, isolated individuals, pregnant women, unemployed/ unskilled/ untrained people. 

ENSURE created a holistic model providing a radical system redesign led by front-line workers to break down existing professional silos as well as a bottom-up, peer-supporter approach.

By acting at both levels simultaneously, it reached people in a timely fashion, reducing the cost to society of the bigger ‘labelled’ problems further down the line. This created less vulnerable communities, providing support where ‘everybody counts’ and enabling positive community development.

Via large-scale implementation of peer-to-peer support, ENSURE aimed to prevent the physical/mental/emotional harm caused by the lack of access to appropriate services, empowering people to participate in society.

​The project main outputs are:
● A new cost-effective, evaluated model to reduce & prevent vulnerability & the gap between people & state services, building on PP6’s highly successful ‘Mums for Mums’ network of peer-to-peer community volunteers & linking 3 groups into a successful solution: professionals, peer supporters & vulnerable people.
● 2 training programmes for: 1) health, social care & welfare professionals/volunteers/NGOs, based around mentalisation (‘walk a kilometre in my shoes’) led by front-line workers; 2) peer-to-peer community volunteers acting as intermediaries between the vulnerable & state services; plus an evaluation of these programmes.
These outputs benefited vulnerable people, such as: migrants, culturally, socially, and economically vulnerable individual adults and families. These outputs would allow trained professionals to work more effectively & help trained volunteers gain opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Check the “Outputs” section below to download related material and see “Main Achievements” section for further information about the achieved results.

In 2016, 118m people in the EU (23.5% of population) lived in households at risk of poverty/social exclusion. The 2 Seas area was particularly affected by this as coastal or border regions tend to present the highest levels of rural isolation. This is further exacerbated by limited transport infrastructure which hampers access to employment & the development of social relations, increasing the isolation of certain population groups.
ENSURE project partners combined several disciplines (public health, social care, community centre, HE, charity, employment) in which approaches to the vulnerable were varied. All partners working together tackled the common problem of poor communication between professionals & the people they serve, drawing upon existing expertise. It co-created a model that drew upon what worked & identified & addressed gaps in the systems that resulted in many people not accessing the services they needed.
The cross-border cooperation allowed partners to learn from similar initiatives. Where some local input was more top-down, other partners functioned more bottom-up. The cooperation between diverse perspectives brought constructive insights to work. The time that partners got by participating in this project helped them to embed these valuable insights into their functioning. Through cross-border cooperation, partners were able to share best practices and analysis. It has also enabled the social workers who accompany various target groups to open up to other practices and to enrich their approaches. In associations, social workers have a very heavy workload and have little time to organise such exchanges that were an opportunity for them thanks to ENSURE. The project has facilitated these exchanges which enriched work across all four countries. It challenged partners and encouraged them to step back from their actual practices to see better how they could improve it by being more innovative.