OLIve Weekend Program (OLIve-WP)

Established in Hungary in January 2016, OLIve WP now offers weekend courses in academic subjects, English, advocacy and training to refugees and asylum seekers in Austria, Greece, Hungary and the United Kingdom.

The academic, language and advocacy strands at OLIve-WP remain broadly similar to those of OLIve-UP but the language component is not specifically geared towards university entry and the academic learning of a language. The training portion is more comprehensive, including workshops on setting up a business and integration into the job market.  An academic stream is maintained in OLIve WP because some students may not be able to commit to an intensive full-time program like OLIve-UP for work or family reasons.

In Hungary, OpEn offers three tracks in its 18-week OLIve-WP programme, focusing on creating systematic and comprehensive curricula for students interested in academic study, on developing key competencies and skills for students interested in entering the job market whether in the private or public sector, and advocacy training for students interested in building careers as human rights defenders or educators.

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece, has only recently joined REIs, and it starts by running a pilot 12-week OLIve-WP in 2019, to be followed by a needs analysis reflecting the situation in Greece.

University of Vienna focuses its energies on addressing the needs of two often marginalised members of the refugee population, namely women and youth aged between 16 and 18.  Opportunities for women refugees to enter the program are set up, focusing on the provision of high quality childcare (OLIve-Women).  As there is no requirement, in Austria, for young people aged 16 to 18 to attend school, University of Vienna has set up OLIve-Youth designed to ensure the inclusion of this important pre-adult age group into wider societal structures including higher education. 

OLIve-WP at UEL focuses on providing key English classes to prepare students for academic study over a 12 week period and couples this with training to ensure that refugee voices remain heard in the the hostile environment that the UK government has fostered towards migrants in the country.  UEL OLIve-WP has also teamed up with a migrant organisation the Evelyn Oldfield Unit, enabling students to take their accredited Research for Action course. UEL offers an accredited Life Stories course, which OLIve-WP students can also enrol in.

The driving principle behind the working methodology and curricula is the development of situation-specific, intensive courses that respond to and seek to remedy the roots of refugee marginalisation from education and the national job market.