DARE 2

The DARE 2 Project is a response to the problem of low disability awareness in mainstream education, vocational training and the open labour market.
The knowledge of disability and daily functioning of people with disabilities is limited almost exclusively to the interested parties themselves, their families and friends as well as disability experts. DARE 2 wants to challenge this by disseminating such knowledge amongst selected professional groups.
The main aim of the project is to raise the level of disability awareness amongst academic teachers and managers of small and medium size enterprises, i.e. employee groups with an impact upon education and recruitment of people with disabilities.
The project’s specific objectives are as follows:
– Providing both professional target groups with reliable knowledge on disability and its types as well as physiological and
psychological consequences and barriers faced by disabled people in access to education and the labour market along with
ways of eliminating them;
– Developing in academic teachers and SME managers an active attitude supporting people with disabilities as regards
access to knowledge and the labour market;
– Equipping both target groups with the ability to get in contact with disabled people correctly and efficiently;
– Eliminating routine thinking about disability, stereotypes and withdrawal attitudes, and
– Building a culture of diversity in educational institutions and SMEs based on the knowledge gained whilst on training.
The DARE 2 consortium consists of four institutions:
The Jagiellonian University and the University of Iceland are public schools of higher education with major achievements as regards supporting disabled students and work with academic staff in this field. The Cyprus Adult Education Association offers training for adults and courses for educators from across Europe running many European projects as part of the Lifelong Learning Programme. Learning Difference is a private business offering disability awareness courses for the public and private sectors in the UK.
The tangible outcomes of the project will be manuals for trainers and multimedia training materials for academic teachers and SME managers. The DARE project website http://www.dareproject.eu is going to be much used, a site dedicated to disseminating the idea of social inclusion in line with the Social Model of understanding disability. The website also promotes disability awareness courses as training developing basic vocational staff competences. The measures envisaged under DARE 2 support the spirit of Article 8 of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, signed by all the Member States of the European Union and Iceland.