MINDBLOOM partners meet in Lisbon for project’s kick-off meeting
- CIS-Iscte
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
On April 21 and 22, 2026, the team of MINDBLOOM met at Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, for the project’s kick-off meeting and a conference, open to the community, to present the project and its partners.
MINDBLOOM - Mental Health, Inclusion, and Democratic Participation: Building a Learning and Outreach-Oriented Model for All Children, funded by the European Commission (CERV-2025-CHILD-101253577), is an interdisciplinary, multinational project that aims to make democratic participation genuinely accessible to children whose life experiences have systematically denied them that possibility. Led by the project’s coordinator, CIS-Iscte’s researcher Carla Moleiro, the kick-off meeting served as the formal starting point of the research project, aligning partners tasks, and how the project work will proceed.
The meeting also comprised a conference titled "Children's Rights and Participation: From Mental Health to Co-Decision,” open to the community, that took place in the afternoon of April 22, aligned with a close connection with stakeholders in the community which attended the event, in particular those that work with vulnerable children and youth such as those in out-of-home care and unaccompanied youths.
The event started with an intervention from CIS-Iscte’s director, Margarida Garrido, and a presentation of the project by Carla Moleiro and a roundtable with project partners. The conference also counted on two invited keynote speakers, Mónica López López (University of Groningen), with the talk “Listened to and taken seriously: A research journey on children's participation in Child Protection”, and Sofie Denise de Smet (KU Leuven), with the talk “Transcultural trauma care for refugee youth: The role of social support structures in family and community relationships”.
The event closed with the roundtable “Practices & Testimonies”, with sharing of experiences of community partners (Casa Pia de Lisboa, Aldeias de Crianças SOS, InPulsar) and Kifayat Ullah (Pakistan), an unaccompanied youth living in Portugal.
