Re-engaging youth through green jobs

Background The project “Re-engaging youth through green job” aimed 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 wanted 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 wished 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 Commision, 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. Objectives Through this project we aimed 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 providing young people with the long-term impacts of the program through the sustainable establishment of these programs within the partner organisations and by disseminating the creation of the program even further; - Creating 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 their day to day life struggle; - 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 resposible, 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. Implementation To ensure the good progress of this program, we implemented all the steps that we planned : Kick-Off Meeting Online May 2022 Study visit in France July 2022 Online implementation meetings monthly, september 2022 - march 2023 Output creation : analysis of NEETs situation may - october 2022 Training of trainers in France November 2022 Youth Exchange in Greece April 2023 Mid-term meeting online parallel to youth exchange in april 2023 Output creation : step by step guide may 2023 - september 2023 Youth Exchange in Cyprus September 2023 Local multiplier event in Greece february 2024 Local multiplier event in Cyprus just after Greece FInal Meeting online just after multiplier event (february 2024) all the activities will be described in detail later, there is all the program uploaded on the cloud as well : https://kdrive.infomaniak.com/app/share/1071431/0c516a79-54bd-4715-8e38-acc7a97049aa Achievements With the experience of 3PA, collective planning and implementation meetings, study visits, training of trainers and experimentations of the new re-engagement programs the project partners were able 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 ten days, 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 was drafted by all partner organisations collectively. This guide include step to step instructions in establishing the program, an a 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 hoped to encourage the establishment of additional re-engagement programs around green jobs.