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Last week I had the pleasure of attending a seminar organised by one of our associate members, the YES Forum, which aims at fostering the social inclusion and active participation of children and young people who experience disadvantage and exclusion.

During the discussions, several participants made the point that it is difficult for young excluded people to find employment. This wasn’t a surprise when Eurostat shows that the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 is more than twice the rate of the working age population (in April 2013, 23.5% in the EU-27 compared to 11%).

The focus of the discussion was how to overcome barriers at the national level to ensure the social integration of young excluded people.

In Sweden some local public authorities have taken on the responsibility to recruit and train young people. However they cannot be recruited on a permanent basis and afterwards they still have difficulty in finding employment in the private sector.

In a region in Italy, public authorities offer microcredit to excluded young people (up to 5000 euros) to ensure that they can remain afloat and pay their energy bills or their rent so they don’t get evicted. Shouldn’t these young people be supported with social protection schemes instead of having to borrow money to cover their basic needs?

In Krakow, a social NGO provides education to excluded young adults and it ensures that they can integrate in university and get a degree. The same NGOs recruit the graduating students to teach excluded young adults. They are perceived as role models and are a real example of what they can become with the support of the social NGO.

A final example was the restaurant in Vilnius, Manu Guru, which I mentioned in a previous editorial. Tired of training young excluded people without finding them a job, the social NGO established a restaurant in the centre of the Lithuanian capital to show that their trainees were as capable as anybody else to cook, wait on customers, or ensure the organisation of supplies (you will notice in the hyperlink that customers did not realise that it was a social enterprise working with excluded young people).

The participants of the seminar concluded that social economy and social enterprises are a response to their issue: yes you can find a job after being supported by social NGOs.

My question remains: do we have to do everything by ourselves? Do Social NGOs have to create the companies that our youth are supposed to work in? As usual the response is never black or white. Yes the social economy is a good model that usually integrates our values of social progress together with employment. At the same time, we need the private sector to be more open and actively participate in the integration of our youth.

Let’s engage!

Pierre Baussand – Director