The partnership meets in Cyprus for the third and last transnational meeting of the Erasmus+ QUALITY YOUTH MENTORING FOR INCLUSION

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The partnership of the Erasmus+ project QUALITY YOUTH MENTORING FOR INCLUSION, co-funded by the European Union, hold the third and last transnational meeting of the project in Nicosia (Cyprus) on Monday, September 23rd, 2024. The objective of the meeting was to analyse the conclusions drawn from the pilot tests conducted in the different countries involved in the initiative and to plan the following dissemination activities and multiplier events.

According to the final evaluation forms, most of the participants feel satisfied or very satisfied with the mentoring process. They also assert that they have experienced a significant or highly significant personal growth and development through the whole process. Among their testimonies, we find people that would repeat the initiative “a thousand times” and that would “love to meet more children with similar conditions”. Others assert that the mentoring process has been “a great experience and a very beautiful personal enrichment”. The partnership will now implement these conclusions to the intellectual outputs of the project to improve the results.

Before the meeting, the representatives of the different partnership entities visited the Karaiskakio Foundation, a nonprofit organization set in Cyprus that combines volunteering and specialized scientific support, in order to serve the needs of patients with haematological malignancies and other related disease. Mr. Paul Kosteas, executive director of the Centre for the Study of Haematological Malignancies of the Karaiskakio Foundation, and Mrs. Violeta Christophidou, PhD in Pediatrics and Medical Genetics and founder and first lead of the Clinical Genetics Clinic in Cyprus, guided us through the facilities and introduce us to the different research teams that work in the Bone Marrow Donor Registry and the Cord Blood Registry. We also dedicated some time to discuss the importance of multidisciplinary teams when talking about rare diseases, and the different initiatives developed to raise awareness in society, such as the project “We Care for Rare”.

Thanks to Cyprus Alliance for Rare Disorders and to the Karaiskakio Foundation for hosting a welcoming and enriching meeting!