The Social Policy and Action Organization is actively involved as a Partner Organization in the "Re-Engaging Youth Through Green and Greening Jobs" Project, which is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the EU.
The project “Re-engaging youth through green job” aims at creating re-engagement programs focusing on NEET youth using green and greening jobs as an integration tool. Young people not in education, employment or training face particular vulnerabilities, especially social and labour market exclusion. To remedy these vulnerabilities and provide young people with innovative solutions in training and education, this project seeks to create re-engagement programs around green jobs adapted to the needs of youth who have been “out of the system” for quite some time. Through this project 3PA wishes to experiment the creation of its innovative solution outside of the borders of France for the first time and to disseminate their creation even further.
NEET youth face particular vulnerabilities. Today, around 9.3 million young people fall into this category at high risk of exclusion. While the Youth Guarantee is a successful initiative of
the European Commission, Europe’s public and private actors need to be even more proactive, especially considering the disproportionate impact of recessions on youth
unemployment. The current climate of relatively weak labour demand is a good time to invest in the skills of the most vulnerable young people and ensure that they are fully prepared when labour demand does pick up. This is why 3PA has established a strategic partnership in which a diversity of partner organisations collectively work on innovative solutions helping young people to re-engage with skill development and the labour market.
Using green jobs in this context has shown to have two major advantages: First of all, as most of those jobs are manual, a very active pedagogy can be applied. Through experimentation and learning by doing, the reproduction of structures and dynamics that alienated these young people from learning and training are avoided. Secondly, through the
use of green jobs as a pedagogical tool social and environmental objectives can be pursued simultaneously: young people who tend to be distanced from environmental practices become aware of environmental problems and their personal impacts all the while providing them with job opportunities that help them make ends meet.
Building on the experience of 3PA, collective planning and implementation meetings, study visits, training of trainers and experimentations of the new re-engagement programs will
lead the project partners to create two major outputs:
- Preparation and implementation of re-engagement programs: the program has been designed to respond to the needs of NEETs and other youth who have been distanced from the labour market due to different reasons. The average length of these programs amount to two months, during which the young people are introduced to environmental topics, making
them discover green jobs in a playful way and working on basic professional behaviour and skills.
- Building on these experiences a guide for the establishment of remobilisation programs will be drafted by all partner organisations collectively. This guide should include step to step instructions in establishing the program, details on activities and methodology as well as lessons learned concerning local adaptation. By disseminating this program to other european youth and environmental organisations, we hope to encourage the establishment of additional re-engagement programs around green jobs.
Through this project we aim to impact young people, other non-governmental organisations, public institutions and the general public by:
- Creating wider and transnational access to re-engagement programs and thus provide young people with the long-term impacts of the programs through the sustainable
establishment of these programs within the partner organisations and by disseminating the creation of the program even further;
- Creating of awareness for and knowledge on: the vulnerabilities and needs of NEET youth and how to reach out to them more effectively, the relation between the ecological
transition, job creation and skill developments, the possibilities of re-engagement programs using green jobs as a re-integration tool, the opportunities green jobs provide in creating
environmental awareness within a public mainly preoccupied with making ends meet;
- Initiating a more comprehensive attitude toward NEET youth within the partner organisations leading to behaviour changes, expressed in the particular attention given to this target group in their activities as well as in the adaptation of pedagogical approaches to their needs;
Long term benefits of these programs on young people are not only better chances of and a renewed drive to return to employment, education or training but include also the
encouragement of becoming more autonomous and responsible, the ability to overcome past obstacles on social and professional life, an improved orientation in training or employment possibilities as well as the creation of awareness for environmental topics.