"Due to the international crisis and wars, more and more refugees are seeking asylum in Europe. Lots of refugees, especially of families from Syria and a lot of unaccompanied minors, are trying to get into Europe from the Western Balkans. So suddenly border countries like Bulgaria (BG) and Romania (RO) - being among the poorest countries within the EU - had to deal with a rising number of refugees in general, but also with unaccompanied minors and school-aged children. The figures for these atypical host countries are still lower than the EU’s most popular destinations, including Sweden, France, and Germany (DE), but both countries are ill prepared for the impact of suddenly becoming a host country for refugees. They have no experience in managing larger number of refugees and have no tradition of refugee work. In contrary DE has a broad experience in dealing and working with refugees since the 70ies, in absolute numbers it is receiving the highest number of refugees within the EU. Especially volunteers and non profit organisations play a vital role in refugee work: they support refugees in the field of housing, food and clothing, but also provide learning opportunities and leisure time activities for the refugees. For RO and BG volunteering and refugee work are new developments and therefore they can benefit from the experience of a German NPO. So this is the reason, why this strategic partnership involved the volunteer organisations ""Gemeinsam leben & lernen in Europa"" from Germany, ""Tulip Foundation"" from Bulgaria and ""Centrul de Voluntariat Cluj-Napoca"" from Romania.The partners decided to concentrate on one problem most of the refugees in their country face: not being able to understand and speak the language of their host country. While a lot of refugees learned English or French back home or during their flight, usually German, Bulgarian and Romanian are not studied. Therefore most of the refugees arriving in DE, RO and BG do not speak the language. But only if refugees are able to communicate and to understand the language of their host country, they can express themselves directly without depending on translation services of others. Mastering the new language will empower the refugees, and will also help them to understand the cultural differences and requirements of their host country. So failing communication is an essential problem, and makes refugee work even more difficult. And this is where volunteers can help: teaching refugees their own language. The German organisation GLL has developed a good practice model for addressing this problem: it has set up a successful volunteer language mentor programme for kids and adult refugees: trained volunteers help refugees on a 1:1, face-to-face basis to learn the language, being able to communicate and understanding the culture of their new home. Additionally GLL has developed some easy to understand and use learning and teaching material for the volunteer mentors. The goal of this partnership was to transfer this successful volunteer programme and the learning material to BG and RO and to adapt the program to the needs, culture, circumstances in these two countries and through the huge expertise of the two involved volunteer organisations. Additionally partners adapted this program to attract young volunteers becoming language mentors for refugee children and youth. Additionally partners improved - with the support of young refugees and volunteers from all 3 countries - the existing teaching material, to fit the needs of the young volunteers as ""non-professional"" teachers and young mentees. Mentors and mentees collected photos on the topics they are interested in, and based on this partners developed new learning and teaching materials. Together all three partners improved the training and support of young volunteers working with young refugees and produce a freely available manual in English, German, Bulgarian & Romanian for training of young language mentors, information sessions for refugees (parents, youth), and intercultural training of the young volunteers and refugees. The final product is a physical tool box with teaching and learning material (e.g. picture cards, simple grammar book, exercises, games, maps etc.) and a language manual with 10 communication situations, which can be used in the refugee work across Europe. The overall aim of this project is to enhance the European dimension of supporting volunteers in refugee work and to improve the integration of refugees in the different European countries by giving them the opportunity to learn the language of their receiving country - especially in countries, were hosting of refugees is a new development and difficult for NGOs. We hope that our “European” model of a volunteer language mentoring programme is useful for other NGOs and will be copied by many."