Facilitating ‘meaningful social interaction’ of people of different backgrounds is increasingly recognized as an important tenet of mainstream programming and policies aimed at promoting migrant inclusion and broader social cohesion. This toolkit aims to provide project managers and developers with guidance on the design, implementation, and evaluation of social mixing and intergroup contact programs. IOM partnered with leading researchers in the field of intergroup contact in the development of this toolkit which covers not only theory and research on social cohesion and intergroup contact but explains how this research and academic knowledge can inform and be applied within IOM’s social mixing programs. The toolkit also covers how to evaluate the impact of activities on participants’ perceptions and attitudes towards other groups, including concrete concepts to be measured and examples of survey questions to be used to measure these concepts. Thereby the toolkit provides a standardized but flexible approach to evaluating social mixing interventions that has been piloted successfully in IOM missions. 

This toolkit will provide its readers with insights and concrete steps on scientific and evidence-based approaches to migrant inclusion and social cohesion through social mixing programs. It also allows readers to learn from their programming and develop more impactful social cohesion activities, to contribute to academic knowledge and policy development on inter-group contact.

The toolkit is complemented by a free of charge, self-paced e-course, available on IOM's E-Campus learning platform for external audience, both in English and in Spanish