Schools, religious communities and local authorities' Harmonised Initiative to Enhance Local resilience

ongoing

"Different international conflicts have been underlying the increase of religious and culturally motivated hatred and violence, mostly targeting symbolic locations. Hence, SHIELDed aims to mitigate their impact by contributing to the protection of soft targets, focusing on schools and faith-based organisations and communities. Through a cooperative approach, SHIELDed mobilises key stakeholders from the religious, security, and educational settings, capacitating these towards a collective engagement to mitigate prejudices, hatred, and violence against religious locations and groups. For this, SHIELDed will activate their role in pre-emptive and responsive mechanisms, via practical and effective tools, capacity-building approaches, and awareness-raising. Hence, SHIELDed has 3 general objectives: (1) enhance the security of places of religious development and freedom by building safe and tolerant local communities; (2) capacitate soft targets and communities to prevent, respond, and mitigate religious and cultural hate and violence; and (3) build a security culture for soft targets and local (religious) communities grounded on cross-sectoral cooperation, resilience, and literacy enhancement. SHIELDed responds to the call priority by contributing to ""increasing the perception and the feeling of security and safety of the targeted religious communities, through the establishment of communication channels, communication plans, tools, mechanisms, guidance materials, and good practices for stakeholders involved in the protection of places of worship, schools, and community gatherings"". SHIELDed will directly impact around 800 stakeholders."