A summer school for parents of the curly haired: afro heritage and identity in Europe

The main objective was to empower parents of mixed race children to actively accompany their children ́s process of identity formation, so that they’ll feel proud of their multiple heritages. This...

The main objective was to empower parents of mixed race children to actively accompany their children ́s process of identity formation, so that they’ll feel proud of their multiple heritages. This included increasing the awareness of the European mixed-ethnic reality – that Europeans are also dark-skinned, curly haired and often partly with ancestry from outside of EU countries. It also included increasing the self-appreciation amongst minorities with african ancestry in the white-normative societies of the EU. It included letting mixed people know that skin color is not the defining factor for being European and offer “European” as one possible identity for them.

We prepared and held a 3 day summer school for parents where at least one parent is of African ancestry. There was childcare with a children´s programme during the event. The overall objective was to support parents in dealing with everyday situations that address the fact that their children are not white and to support them in helping their children grow up feeling proud of their identity. We used working with hair as our primary method, since hair is an important expression of identity and at the same time an easy trigger for conversation. We did research to prepare our staff for the event. We engaged in dissemination activities to broaden our impact and reach people beyond our primary target groups, such as youth/sport clubs that are frequented by Afro-European children, kindergartens, schools and more.

60 people participated in the 3-days Summer School. We created a 24 pages magazine that reports about the topics covered during the Summer School and makes the knowledge from there accessible beyond. We created an 18 minutes documentary about the Summer School. We reached 96.000 people through our dissemination activities. The project resulted also in the creation of a new company that now engages in designing and delivering workshops also for Afro-European families: Urban Flamingo. All partners and the newly created company have handed in an Erasmus+ application for a follow up project.