Introduction

In many European member states, there are telephone or Internet-based crisis services for people in distress, with suicidal intent, various mental health problems and many life-limiting problems. The task of the crisis services is to accompany these people, to provide them with contact or a relationship, to support them emotionally, to provide guidance and, if necessary, to limit the risk of suicide. Most crisis services work with volunteers who are carefully trained over a period of several months for this responsible activity.

According to the International Association of Telephone Emergency Services (IFOTES), there are about 350 crisis centers in Europe with over 20,000 volunteers providing day and night emerygency assistance, with over 4 million phone calls and over 100,000 internet contacts. Every year 2-3 thousand volunteers must be trained to maintain the emergency service around the clock. Recruiting volunteers is complex and expensive, and ongoing training is required. The core competency for crisis response is listening.

Against this background, 8 partners from 5 EU Member States joined an interdisciplinary consortium to expand existing knowledge on listening skills more individually, to study listening architecture, to measure people’s skills and their ability to listen with their hearts, and to provide new attitudes towards the technique and art of competent listening.

The strategic partnership of the Erasmus+ program “MonaLisa” (Measurement of nowadays advanced Listening-Skills attitudes) was funded by EU funds and consisted of six Telephone Emergency Services (TES) from DE, IT, HU, FR, and ES, a research center specialized in emotional and mental health (DE), a training provider and consultant in the field of social skills, competence assessment and career guidance (IT), and a digital platform solutions developer (DE).

The outcome of the project is a questionnaire for self-assessment of listening skills, the presentation of the result across eight different dimension of listening, and an exercise program that uses case studies to train listening sensitivity within the eight dimensions.

The online tool is available for free and can be easily integrated into existing websites. The aim of the partnershipis to highlight, across Europe in different languages, the importance oflistening skills for social interaction throughout Europe in different languages and to stimulate an intensive learning-based examination of one’s own listening skills.