ABOUT THIS ONLINE PLATFORM


Between October 2017 and September 2019, the partners of the Erasmus+ project Firefighters Plus (www.firefightersplus.eu) developed an innovative set of online courses and tools to inspire and support firefighters across the EU to use their position as role models to promote social inclusion. The project results were well over the initial expectations: it won the European Fire Safety Award; it was presented as a good practice in the European Forum on Integration of Migrants and Refugees in Hamburg (Germany); it was presented as a good practice in the International Safety Education Seminar in Antwerp (Belgium); it was presented as a good practice by the Danish National Agency for the Erasmus+ programme; in Poland, the National Chief Fire Officer recommended all firefighters across the country use the Firefighters Plus online platform; in the Netherlands, the Firefighters Plus online platform was presented at the Dutch Fire Congress; etc.

Similarly to firefighters in the context of the Firefighters Plus project, whose position as role models is because they are ranked as the most trustworthy profession across all global regions (Trust in professions, GFK Verein, 2016), most people have a very positive perception of fire cadets. Therefore, fire cadets also have a big potential to use their position to promote social inclusion. However, there is an absolute lack of training and tools to inspire and support fire cadets in doing so.

In this context, the objective of the project is to strengthen fire cadets' sense and capacity of social initiative by developing the online platform www.firecadetsplus.eu. The online platform will be accessible from computers, tablets and smartphones, and it will include:


an online course on how fire cadets across the EU can use their good image in society to promote social inclusion;

a tool to assess the learning outcomes from the online course and to generate a certificate for users to add to their Europass documents;

a toolkit with methods and tools that fire cadets can use to plan, implement, follow-up, evaluate and disseminate the results of actions to promote social inclusion;

a collection of good practices and inspiring stories from fire cadets across the EU promoting social inclusion.