MERF - FORMAT 21 - CEDAR - PROGES

Contact details

Contact Name: Daniel NERVENNE
Organisation: FORMAT 21
Address: Place Maugrétout 13
7100 La Louvière
Belgium
Phone:
Fax:		 (+32) 64 227408
(+32) 64 213311
E-mail: format21@swing.be
URL: http://users.swing.be/format21

Project details

Project name

DESPI

Vector

INTEGRA

Key ideas

DESPI is based on four major ideas:

  1. A large number of long-term unemployed do have skills that are no longer demanded by the traditional merchant economy.
  2. The development of social economy companies gives them new grounds for employment.
  3. Yet, social economy companies are too often restricted to the neighbourhood economy. They lack market opportunities to develop and stabilise jobs. Social economy companies must therefore claim Europe as their reference market.
  4. The management of such Europe-wide social economy companies require high-level management and marketing skills.

DESPI also takes the view that the initial skill level of workers will in fine determine the position they will occupy within social economy companies after general and specific skill levelling and reinforcement but may not be a cause for exclusion since production workers, though isolated from productive systems by long-term unemployment, can eventually (after ad-hoc training) become assistant managers and play a more active role than simple production.

DESPI adheres to the so-called "parcours d'insertion" introduced by the Walloon region of Belgium.

Local and institutional partnership

The implementation of DESPI made local and institutional partnership necessary.

Under the banner of the Ministry of Education, Research and Training of the French Community of Belgium, the DESPI project united the efforts of:

FORMAT 21, a public vocational education centre of the City of La Louvière;
CEDAR, a social and professional insertion association;
PROGES, an agency for the promotion and the management of social economy projects.

Together, these partners want to develop a logical and coherent system of guidance, levelling, training and insertion enabling long-term unemployed to:

gain expertise in social economy management or qualify professionally as assistant managers;
create social economy companies based on viable market projects and, therefore, create their own jobs as well as jobs for others;
benefit from free consultance until both companies and jobs are stable;
go beyond the mere neighbourhood economy circle and give their projects a European dimension.

Steps

DESPI is structured as follows:

Preparation, information, negotiation and recruitment:
- local and regional information on the objectives of DESPI
- co-ordination of the roles to be played by social sub-contractors
- recruitment of trainees
- trainers' training in CACE (computer-aided cognitive evaluation) and cognitive educability workshop management to develop trainers' ability to help trainees in ongoing self-evaluation
Socialisation and restructuration:
- initial cognitive self-evaluation process (CACE)
- development of cognitive educability attitudes
- self-affirmation and identification of the group as value
Social economy management training:
- companies in their economic environment
- realities and perspectives of the social economy
- economic and financial management
- marketing and social marketing
- staff management
- strategic management and project implementation
- juridical and fiscal management
- social company government
- IT communication techniques
Project development:
- project stimulation and guidance
- implementation including start-up guidance and evaluation
- networking
- European integration

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