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The development of welfare and support services addressing the needs of vulnerable groups is one of the main priorities in our societies. The current crisis linked to the spread of the Covid19 and the restrictive measures taken to counteract has underlined even more how a strong welfare system is crucial to create sustainable and inclusive communities.

In this context, enhancing the cooperation with the private sector can support the public administrations in addressing the current social issues and in developing more efficient services to foster the educational, labour, and social inclusion of vulnerable groups at risk of marginalization. The MoreThanAJob project aims at supporting this process by fostering the capacities of private and public actors to cooperate in the design, planning, and implementation of welfare and support services.

To develop actions in line with the needs and priorities of the national context of reference, the MoreThanAJob consortium carried out an analysis of international and local best practices in delivering services for the promotion of social and employment inclusion of vulnerable people. Based on this analysis, we have identified three main priorities and policy areas that should be addressed to support the development and delivery of such services:

• An increasingly responsive social service delivery generating greater social stability and livelihood outcomes.
• A progressively growing Social and Solidarity Economy providing greater local economic development opportunities for the most vulnerable community members.
• An education system dynamically adapting to market needs allowing better access to innovative and agile technical education and vocational training programmes targeting different levels of education including an uneducated population.

On this ground, a policy brief has been developed by each partner to provide an overview of the current context in the partner countries on the implementation and ongoing discussion on these priorities. Based on it, we have identified some policy recommendations that could support public administrations and policymakers in the development of policies and action plans to address these priorities

In Italy, following the overview of the current landscape, the recommendations to support the inclusion and development of these policy priorities in public administrations include:

• Raising awareness on social generativity among the representatives of public administrations by creating moments of encountering between them and private actors in order to foster their cooperation in developing strategies and action plans for the development of future initiatives and policies in this field.
• Actively involving the community foundations in the process outlined above as they are an interesting example of social generativity and they could be considered as a starting point for the development of private-public cooperation.
• Improving the cooperation with social enterprises for the development of a strategy for investments and capacity-building actions to promote social entrepreneurship.
• Strengthening the cooperation between research centers, social enterprises, and public administrations to promote the development of innovative projects aimed at addressing social challenges.
• Capitalizing on best practices for the promotion of labour market integration through skills matching and youth empowerment. This will foster the capacity of developing career guidance services that are aware of the labour market needs and can more effectively support young people in finding employment.
• Promoting the development of bridging programmes that could facilitate labour market integration of people without a certificate of acquired qualification.

In the next steps of the project, in each partner country, seminars and forums addressed to representatives of public administrations will be organized to present and discuss the analysis conducted in these months and the related recommendations. They will provide a valuable moment of debate on these themes.

To further support the development of cooperation mechanisms underlined in the above-mentioned recommendations, we have developed the MoreThanAJob online portal. A multilingual interactive space to foster dialogue and cooperation between Social and Solidarity Economy actors and public administrations as well as to facilitate the final beneficiaries’ access to welfare services active in their territory.

The Italian version of the article can be found at this link: https://cesie.org/adulti/politiche-sviluppo-servizi-sostegno-morethanajob/

View the full Policy Brief in Italy 

For further information, send an email to giulia.tarantino@cesie.org

For more information on the project and its activities, visit the MoreThanAJob webpage on the ENI CBC Med website and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.