Lai-momo is the Italian partner of ‘Direction Employment’, a European project set up to foster the job placement of young NEETs (people not engaged in education, employment or training) aged 19 to 29 belonging to marginalised, discriminated or minority social groups, through the acquisition of IT and digital skills required in many professional sectors and of soft skills useful to find and obtain a job.
The partnership consists of organisations from 6 European countries:
– Workshop for Civic Initiatives Foundation – WCIF (Bulgaria)
– Lithuanian Gay League (Lituania),
– Instituto Politécnico do Porto (Portogallo),
– Lai-momo Società Cooperativa Sociale (Italia),
– BICERO, Business Informatics Center Rozman Ltd. (Slovenia)
– DMC Metrix (Irlanda) con un ruolo di consulenza e monitoraggio.
Direction Employment develops an innovative training pathway for young NEETs from vulnerable groups with the aim of improving their employability by providing a specific IT training programme for the labour market in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Italy, Slovenia and Portugal and at the same time promotes the values of diversity and inclusion in the labour market with regard to ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, global citizenship and digital citizenship.
It is aimed at young people aged between 19 and 29, who may belong to different vulnerable groups – Roma, refugees, LGBTI, young people growing up in poverty and school dropouts. The project partners are NGOs, social cooperatives and non-profit educational institutions with experience of working with these target groups. An experienced partner from Ireland provides quality control for the project.
The initiative seeks to respond to the startling 2018 Eurostat statistics, which indicated that 15 million 20-34 year olds in the 28 EU Member States are unemployed or out of school or training. In Italy and Greece, the countries with the highest levels of youth unemployment, more than a quarter of young people are out of the labour market.
The project provides a comprehensive programme based on modern, interactive IT training and an individualised approach tailored to the needs of the students. Specially selected trainers and employers will play a key role in the design of the training programme and its implementation.
As a result, the programme is expected to contribute to reducing youth unemployment, as well as integrating young people from vulnerable groups into the labour market.
The project is funded by the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment for the period 2018 – 2021, extended to March 2023, and unites partners from different sectors, NGOs, education experts, companies from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia and Italy, who have a proven track record of working for the social and labour inclusion of young people from highly marginalised minorities.
Its objectives are:
– Test the educational model in different contexts and with different target groups, whose marginalisation, based on intersectionality (multiplicity of prejudice and discrimination) makes their access to the labour market very difficult;
– Apply a social impact assessment tool that will produce comparative data demonstrating the effectiveness of the methodology on the trainees as well as on their immediate environment (extended family, peer group, etc.) and employers.
For more information: https://directionemployment.org/