The counselling profession in the United States is calling for increased international collaboration, engagement, and understanding of the global issues which impact the way in which counsellors conduct their professional practice, teaching, and research. This book captures the experiences of group workers the world over, inviting them to describe how they facilitate group work to restore wellness, promote healing, and create opportunities for reducing isolation and alienation by tapping into the wisdom of multicultural or indigenous practices. The group work profession underscores the importance of training and service delivery that is rooted in humanistic narratives, with a focus on understanding cross-cultural dynamics. Included in this collection are examples of the rich, creative, and diverse world of group work applications, all of which contribute to a greater knowledge, awareness, and understanding of the many ways in which the power of group membership and leadership can be harnessed for positive change. Group work teachers, practitioners, and counsellor educators will enjoy learning about these creative and important efforts, and take away ideas to implement in their own group work. This book was originally published as two special issues of The Journal for Specialists in Group Work.

In this book Part I presents first an overview of the ECHORD++ project, with its mission and vision together with a detailed structure of its functionalities and instruments: Experiments, Robotic Innovation Facilities and Public end-user Driven Technology Innovation PDTI. Chapter 1 explains how the project is born, the partners, the different instruments and the new concept of cascade funding projects. This novelty made ECHORD++ a special project along the huge number of research groups and consortia involved in the whole project. So far, it is the European funded project with more research team and partners involved in the robotic field. In Chapter 2, one of the instruments in ECHORD++ is explained in detail: RIF. Robotic innovation facilities are a set of laboratories across Europe funded with the project with the goal of hosting consortia involved in any experiment that have special needs when testing their robotic research. In the chapter the three different and specific RIFs will be described and analyzed. Chapter 3 explains an important instrument in ECHORD++: the Experiments. In this part, a big number of research groups have been involve in short time funded research projects. The chapter explains the management of such Experiments, from the call for participation, the candidate's selection, the monitoring, reviews and funding for each of the 36 experiments funded for Echord. Chapter 4 is very special because it presents the innovation of funding public end-user driven technology, in particular, robotic technology. The robotic challenge is the key of such an instruments together with the management of the different consortia that participated competitively in the success of the robotic challenge proposed by a public entity, selected also with a very special and innovative process.

In this book Part I presents first an overview of the ECHORD++ project, with its mission and vision together with a detailed structure of its functionalities and instruments: Experiments, Robotic Innovation Facilities and Public end-user Driven Technology Innovation PDTI. Chapter 1 explains how the project is born, the partners, the different instruments and the new concept of cascade funding projects. This novelty made ECHORD++ a special project along the huge number of research groups and consortia involved in the whole project. So far, it is the European funded project with more research team and partners involved in the robotic field. In Chapter 2, one of the instruments in ECHORD++ is explained in detail: RIF. Robotic innovation facilities are a set of laboratories across Europe funded with the project with the goal of hosting consortia involved in any experiment that have special needs when testing their robotic research. In the chapter the three different and specific RIFs will be described and analyzed. Chapter 3 explains an important instrument in ECHORD++: the Experiments. In this part, a big number of research groups have been involve in short time funded research projects. The chapter explains the management of such Experiments, from the call for participation, the candidate's selection, the monitoring, reviews and funding for each of the 36 experiments funded for Echord. Chapter 4 is very special because it presents the innovation of funding public end-user driven technology, in particular, robotic technology. The robotic challenge is the key of such an instruments together with the management of the different consortia that participated competitively in the success of the robotic challenge proposed by a public entity, selected also with a very special and innovative process.

The counselling profession in the United States is calling for increased international collaboration, engagement, and understanding of the global issues which impact the way in which counsellors conduct their professional practice, teaching, and research. This book captures the experiences of group workers the world over, inviting them to describe how they facilitate group work to restore wellness, promote healing, and create opportunities for reducing isolation and alienation by tapping into the wisdom of multicultural or indigenous practices. The group work profession underscores the importance of training and service delivery that is rooted in humanistic narratives, with a focus on understanding cross-cultural dynamics. Included in this collection are examples of the rich, creative, and diverse world of group work applications, all of which contribute to a greater knowledge, awareness, and understanding of the many ways in which the power of group membership and leadership can be harnessed for positive change. Group work teachers, practitioners, and counsellor educators will enjoy learning about these creative and important efforts, and take away ideas to implement in their own group work. This book was originally published as two special issues of The Journal for Specialists in Group Work.