San Sadurniño looks for involvement of the social fabric in the development of ECMYNN european project

Council and associations meeting

Around ten neighborhood, cultural and sports associations of the town met last thursday called by the municipality in order to know deeply the ECMYNN european project and how they can collaborate in its development. It is a transnational initiative inside the ERASMUS + programme participated by entities from Romania, Polland, Italy and Greece. Its goal is to elaborate strategies to allow connect in a more effective way with youngsters less than 30 in the inclusion of labor market or in their education improvement, in a moment with high levels of unemployment, such as it was comented in the meeting. The departments of Vocational Counseling and Local Development asked for help of the social fabric. Firstly, contributing with ideas and mainly with the involvement of youngsters that they know in the final phase of the project. It now starts and will try to be ended for the results presentations in the beginning of next year.

ECMYNN is the acronym in english of Enhancing Competences to Meet Young Neet´s Needs. The project is all financed by EU, inside ERASMUS + programme . It started in May 2015 and will finish in 2017. Here are cooperating public bodies -italian municipality San Giovanni Teatino and San Sadurniño- with other related with third sector and social action, such as the italian Lynx Territorio Sociale, Caritas Gdansk (Polland), ASCETIS (Romania) and Atom Lifelong Learning from Greece.

Since last year, it was advanced the definition of work methodology, pick up and share good practices that already exist in the several countries related with youngsters that don´t are studying or working for various reasons: lack of opportunities, lack of training, personnel reasons, context or even lack of interest to enter to the labor market or improve their skills. The sociologist Ismael Blanco, -the technician in charge to carry out the final phase of ECMYNN in San Sadurniño-, said during the meeting “it isn´t an homogeneous group, they have a lot of realities”.

So it is , the context of the project work manage ages among 16 and 29 yo, in real life they are “several generations” with different caracteristics and interests and are important to discover. And in this part are important the social entities, Their main rol is mediate in order to “break the invisible barrier” that separates young people and institutions. Social fabric is needed to generates ideas and boosts in order to youngsters want to participate in several work meetings and tell about their whole needs: leisure, vocational, laboral...

The point of the meetings is going to be the Young House, in order to foment the use of its facilities and become in a reference space to youngsters. However, social investigation phase considers go to different points of youth meeting, such as activities organized during summer by the municipality or social entities. In fact, the pick up of information doesn´t be limited only with young people from San Sadurniño or less than 30 because, such as Blanco said, the definition of youngster reaches life styles and troubles that “in the last years have increased up to 35 or more years”

The programme defined by the municipality,makes appointments of coordination with social entities and secondary school, during July and September. Among September and October it will be carried out meetings with youngsters and in November it will be organized the information picked up in the process in order to elaborate proposals of actuation. It will be presented during the beginning of next year in Romania (last transnational meeting) and in San Sadurniño, as a part of results obtained with the whole entities involved in ECMYNN.

The main aim of ECMYNN is to define a guide of good practices with contrasted results which could be used by entities and technicians who work with youth around the whole Europe and would allow connect better with their interests and needs, specially in the fields of work and training. “We try to do something useful, not only to San Sadurniño. “We try that public policies addressed to those ages be designed by themselves”.