The coordinators and members from the five regional intercultural networks in Cyprus have completed the four modules of a recent online intercultural competences course. 

Intercultural competence is what allows a person to be able to navigate comfortably in complex intercultural settings. It means combining skills, attitudes, abilities, and knowledge to face, act and intervene effectively and appropriately in a variety of contexts, where cultural, socio-economic, ethnic, and other lines intersect and can lead to situations of intercultural conflict that can, in turn, damage social cohesion.   

A person is considered interculturally competent if they can successfully communicate and relate with people from other cultural backgrounds. It means mobilizing external and internal resources and it is something that can always be developed and improved throughout our lives. 

The training course focused on four specific objectives:

• To enhance intercultural sensitivity (active interest in other people and their cultural background/ respectful curiosity and empathy)
• To develop intercultural communication skills (communication adjustments for culturally diverse settings)
• To build intercultural commitment (investment in building culturally diverse teams and cities)
• To feel confident navigating in uncertain settings (understanding how to make the best out of diversity advantage and develop it as a source of mutual learning and local innovation)

The participants took home many resources for further study and several of them indicated an interested in a possible follow-up "Train the trainers" course so that they could train other members of the network, in particular so that the course could then be offered in the Greek language. 

This training course was prepared and implemented in the framework of the “Building structures for intercultural integration in Cyprus” project which is being carried out with funding from the European Union, via its Structural Reform Support Programme, and in co-operation with the European Commission's DG for Structural Reform Support.