Meetings and events

The April 2009 meeting in Bucharest has been the focus of an important project carried out with the partnership of five European countries: Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and France. The project, whose aim is to investigate the various solutions after discharge from the childhood protection system of all those young people called hereinafter ‘care leavers', has been defined as "Life after institutional care. Equal opportunities and social inclusion for young people: identification and promotion of best practices".

2010 will be dedicated to social inclusion and the project, sponsored by the General Management of Employment, Social Affairs and Social Inclusion of the European Commission aims at increasing the knowledge and mutual exchange of positive solutions for the social inclusion of young care leavers.

But who are care leavers? Technically, they are all those who have been discharged from the social protection system. We are interested in that section of young people who have grown up in the childhood protection system (i.e. institutes or other type of residential care) and who in the majority of cases, once they have reached the age of 18, are obliged to leave it even without anybody supporting them, caring about them and protecting them. They are young adults who have grown up without their own family, forced to become adults without both emotional and financial resources. Thus, they are at a high risk of social exclusion, and there are still too many of them.

The study project which will end by the end of 2009 deeply involves the directly interested categories and has been thought of as a place of exchange and comparison dedicated to them.

The meeting, which has lasted for three days, has been attended by groups of young people coming from Italy, France, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania as well as from other Eastern Europe countries (Moldova, Ukraine) and it has been dedicated to working together and creating a virtuous circuit of mutual exchange and knowledge.

The groups of young people involved in the project has presented their experiences as well as the results of a monitoring process (a kind of study-action) carried out by themselves in their own country of origin, about the services available for them creating a map of the existing offices and resources. The aim of this has been to help them to structure information material which they could distribute among their peers. This material may also include a series of useful recommendations to face this fundamental time of discharge; recommendations spreaded in the last day at the round table organised with Romanian and European authorities.

This event has been an opportunity to present civil society's best practices and insertion programmes specifically designed in cooperation with the labour market and companies in terms of the widely spread social responsibility of enterprises and aimed at creating solutions of actual employment inclusion.