Elder people learning to be mentors for young people. HEAR ME: An innovative project in five EU countries: A Report on the why, what and how of the project, supplemented with annexes with more detailed analysis and information on the European and local projects.

HEAR ME is about lifelong learning for elderly people. People in Europe get older and there is a demographic movement towards a considerable aging of the population. The EU countries have to redefine themselves and their capacity to act as welfare societies in a globalized world. In this context, elderly people should be considered as a resource for society. This perspective requires that we also intensify working on possibilities for elderly people to keep themselves up-to-date and qualified for new tasks.
That is what HEAR ME is about. We decided to focus on a special possible task for elderly people: being a mentor. Elderly people are experienced, and may also have and strive for both generativity and integrity, so the role as a mentor may very well suited to their situation and aspirations. We focused even more: HEAR ME is about supporting elderly people to become and be mentors for youngsters at risk for marginalization and/or school dropout.
HEAR ME is a joint project between universities and organizations dealing with adult education, community work and volunteering in five countries: Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Spain and the U.K.
The five partners in this project searched for elderly people with ambitions for being a mentor, and at the same time they developed mentoring projects. We had expected that we could find nearly ready-made mentoring projects, but, with the exception of the Netherlands, we were not able to find them. So we had to organize them as well. The lifelong education of the elderly people and the organization of the mentoring projects were parallel processes. So the development and implementation of the courses and the implementation of the volunteer-mentoring-process were intertwined. The reasons for this intertwining of learning and doing are both didactical and organizational. The didactical argument is that the competences required, are a result of both knowledge and skills, and that there is a dialectical relation between knowledge and skills: as you know more, you may be ready to make new experiences and new experiences provide material for reflection. This is the principle of action learning. The organizational argument is, that the project contributes to the development of a new service that only can come about if it is anchored in an organizational context that consist of a complex and specific interplay of recruitment of elderly mentors, course provider, recruitment of mentees, anchoring of the activity in community work, school etc. In that way the project is not only about the development of a course, but about innovation in the welfare society, producing new ways of strengthening social cohesion.
This package contains what we learned when we went through the process of developing the mentor course and the mentor projects. We found out that the circumstances in the different countries were very different: different welfare regimes, different demographic factors, different views on elderly, on schooling etc. So we did not strive for “one size fits all”. Instead we practiced the art of tailoring the suits to the person: the project and the course that fits to the local conditions. In this process we used some analytical and planning instruments: we made a SWOT and a SOAR analysis, we developed the projects in a circular planning process (SMTTE), we developed the didactics of the course along the dynamical model of Hiim and Hippe, and we practiced action learning at the courses.
In this report we present the background for the project: the need for innovation in the European welfare-societies, we will tell about the use of the dynamic project tools, we will share some of our experiences with the mentor-course and the mentoring projects, and we will sketch perspectives of our approach.