Powering a New Future: 10 December 2008, Lisbon

Jerome Vignon, Director, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, European Commission highlights that all the ‘domains of innovation covered by EQUAL are an important message to convey to head of governments and ministers’. EQUAL showed the value of bringing together the diversity and richness of the experience on the ground.  He cites social innovation as a key element for the foundation of Europe in the future as it underpins the novelty and the richness of the European social Model.

This project, based in Northern Ireland, built on the outcomes of a previous project (Personal Progression System) which focussed on pre-release employability training. ReachOut focus was on ex-offenders in the community and building links with employers with “hard to fill” vacancies. Olwen Lyner explains how there is a need of legislation to ensure a more comprehensive approach to provide support for offenders and ex-offenders re-integrating into the labour market. She also sends a crime reduction message to engage employers in a holistic way.

Pat Donnelly explains how the Learning Network on Empowerment and Inclusion will focus on producing a tool to measure empowerment for three different groups: beneficiaries, employers and intermediary agencies. The tool will be tested over the course of the next 2 years.

This National network supports young people who want to re-engage in education and motivates them to fulfil their social and professional skills. Gediminas’ main message is that working together for common things helps achieve more and in a more efficient way. He highlights the importance of ensuring that great ideas that came out from EQUAL are not lost and continue to be implemented in the future.

The network aim is to ‘implement better programmes with better results, deliver quality and achieve the objectives of the Lisbon agenda’. His main message is ‘cooperation and collaboration’: Involving the key stakeholders from the start and disseminating the achievements widely ensures that everyone can use them and adapt them to their own needs. He highlights the importance of looking at good practices not only within the EU but beyond and proactively sharing these practices. One of the expected outputs of this network will be a source book gathering the results of practices, programmes and methods.

This project tried to improve the financial position of spouses that work together with their partners in the agricultural sector. Their financial position is often insecure regarding income, capital and social security. She explains the current cooperation with financial organisations to use their knowledge to address the problems of women in this sector established through the EQUAL project.

The Community of Practice on Inclusive Entrepreneurship (COPIE) aims to strengthen the capacity of practitioners and policy makers to design, plan, manage and evaluate projects, programmes and policies to help make entrepreneurship a normal option for anyone in society. To do this, COPIE collects information and knowledge, connects people working in the field of entrepreneurship, provides training and technical assistance.

She gives an explanation of the composition of the network aimed at supporting asylum seekers and victims human trafficking.  She highlights the importance of the exchange of information and good practices that already exist between members as key factor for the success of the network activities and calls for other Member States to join.

This project started in 1993, influenced by a major tragic event that resulted in 21 people killed by the police at the community of Vigario Geral in Brazil. As a result, people saw the necessity of helping out the community in order to put a stop of negative activities and create new positive ones.  Afroreggae was set up in order to promote cultural activities within the community. There are 74 projects, which include 5 radio programmes; one weekly TV programme; a monthly magazine which is published in India, Canada, USA, Colombia; 4 launched films.  Vigario Geral has also produced 11 local music bands that currently use informal instruments, ‘recycled instruments’ as cans, big pots and an international band. New projects are coming up including a cultural centre in London amongst others, and training centres for young people in India, China and Colombia.

The project supported the creation and maintenance of social cooperatives for people with mental health problems. Synergia’s approach incorporates both the empowerment of people with mental health problems and a viable strategy to create jobs for this target group He explains how the active involvement and engagement stakeholders was a key factor for the success of the project.