How to tackle long-term unemployment? Community development can be a good alternative to traditional solutions
Poor transport links, depopulation, the disintegration of large agricultural and industrial enterprises - these are all factors that lead to employment problems. Their consequences must deal with everyday residents of smaller towns and villages remote from regional centers. How to improve the situation? The answer is looking for Project Work habits.
The project, which aims to boost employment in small towns and rural areas, have joined forces experts of various sectors. Architects, Geobotanica, anthropologists and historians started off in a few selected regions of the Czech Republic in cooperation with local authorities searched for what could be improved in that area. How could such. Could develop entrepreneurship, community life and tourism so because new jobs were created. The results of their research have developed ideas for products and services, which would be in this or that place might be interested.The next step is then involved in the project had specific participants from among the local population - the unemployed and career counselors. More than nineteen hundred people passed through motivational counseling and possibly by training positions tipped by experts from the team. The result? Dozens of newly created jobs and hundreds of recommendations, which in future could rise further. "The potential is hidden in local people, the landscape and the historical heritage of the village. We reveal this potential and help exploit. Now the use of local resources, we see the future and the sufficiency of sites and individuals, "says Miroslav Prochazka, director of the Fund of continuing education (FDV), an organization that covers and implements the project.
As key to the smooth running of the project showed the role of counselor, who was accompanied by among other clients for a job interview. One of the symptoms of long-term unemployment is weakening social and communication skills, and hence the need for job seekers to support the changes, which it wants to achieve. The first visible results were not long to wait, and some participants in the project and through professional counseling managed to embark on a new "community" positions.
Jesenicko example, with the help of researchers and consultants involved in the project Work habits managed to build a successful family business the production and sale of rose-hip wine. Anthropologist from the project here ran into a client who has long been registered in the job, at home while rosehip dedicated to the production of wine from fruit, which he himself collected.
From interviews with local showed that people often demanded products which they know exactly where they came from - a client, then, after consultation with a specialist left his product certified as "Jesenice original product." Thanks to the project, working habits found that the Labour Office of the Czech Republic he may provide a subsidy to the emergence of a new job. Now, together with a partner to successfully operate a small family business and it is clear that in the future, at each start-up entrepreneur earns even without subsidies.
Recommendations and research results to individual locations (Karlovy Vary region, South Moravia, Zlin region, Vysocina Region and Olomouc region) summarized research reports are available on the project website www.pracovninavyky.cz.