Welcome to Exchange House Travellers Service.
We are an organisation of Travellers and settled people working together to provide services to Travellers in the Dublin area.

We provide Family Support, Youth Services, Drugs Counselling and Education programmes to members of the Traveller community in the Dublin area.
Click here to download our last Annual Review (2003/2004)

Exchange House Employment Positions Available.
Exchange House Traveller Services provides a range of services to the Traveller community in the Dublin area. These services include family support, youth work and educational programmes.

We are inviting applications for the following positions working in the family support team:


(1) Local Training Initiative Co-Ordinator

Application Forms are available on www.activelink.ie or www.exchangehouse.ie

Completed Application Forms only (no CV’s) should be sent to The Director, Exchange House Travellers Service, 61 Great Strand Street, Dublin 1.

Traveller Literacy Education receives EU boost
Exchange House Travellers Service, an organisation dedicated to providing assistance for travellers in Dublin is one of eight Irish bodies that will receive funding under Minerva – the EU’s distance education and eLearning €7.5m programme. Two Irish organisations – Waterford Institute of Technology and L. M. Ericcson have been chosen to lead projects from a total award list of 26 projects.

Exchange House will team up with partners in Austria and Italy in a German-led research project “Alpha-Beta – new methods for services for people with literacy difficulties in adult education” aimed at helping adult education teachers to utilise modern communications technologies to support teaching and knowledge acquisition. An estimated 80% of Irish travellers have literacy difficulties.

Waterford Institute of Technology will lead a project entitled “Multiple intelligences instructional design framework for virtual classes”. Partners in Turkey, UK, Cyprus, France as well as Multimedia Instructional Design, Waterford and Blended Learning Design from Longford will participate in the project.

L. M. Ericcson in Dún Laoghaire will study “MLearning” – the provision of education and training on PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), smartphones and mobile phones with a range of partners in Belgium, Portugal, Hungary, Norway and Bulgaria. There are currently over 2 billion mobile devices in the world and this is targeted to rise to 3 billion by 2010.

Other Irish institutions who are partners in successful bids are

Dublin City University
St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra
National College of Ireland

Pat O’Connor of the HEA, is the Irish National Contact for Minerva

“The continued success of Ireland in attracting EU funding in this highly competitive area underlines the range of exciting and innovative work that is being done in the elearning field in this country. I am also very pleased to see that the spread of successful organisations embraces the higher education, business and community-based sectors.”

For additional information on the EU Alpha-Beta and
Alpha-Omega Projects please visit
www.alpha-eu.de

Exchange House Travellers Service
Since 1980, Exchange House has operated in the city centre area to work with Travellers who are at points of crisis in their lives. Click here for a short history

Our Services
Our services come under four main programme areas, they are as follows:

Family Support Service
The Family Support Service provides a range of services: Social Work, Family Support and Welfare Rights information. Read more

Youth Services
Travellers Youth Service is the main provider of Youth Services to the Traveller Community in the greater Dublin Area. Through social and personal education the Youth Service aims to ensure that as many young Travellers are able to reach their full potential through participation in youth activities.

We hope to increase their chances of staying on in school, enhance their personal and community development skills and enable them to take greater control of their own lives. Read more

Drugs Response
Since 2003, Exchange House has provided addiction counselling to drugs users and their families. Read more

Education
Exchange House Centre for Education and Development
In 2005, the Christian Brothers gave Exchange House the use of a premises on Great Strand Street, Dublin. Our experience with our target group, the most marginalized Travellers in the Dublin area, indicated that a specific initiative was necessary to engage our clients in a process of education and development which was appropriate to their needs and could offer them adequate support to ensure the most successful outcomes.

There are several initiatives in the pipeline and we will be posting information on them in the near future. Read more

We run a Women’s Education Group in the city centre. This programme provides opportunities for Traveller women to access second chance education. Read more

Funders
We appreciate the support given by the wide range of agencies who fund the programmes in Exchange House. In addition to our core funders, the Health Service Executive and the City of Dublin Youth Service Board, many other agencies support our work. Click here for further information.