On May 25 and 26, Microfinanza organized the 6th YES! project conference – Young Entrepreneurs Succeed in Bologna.
Katia Raguzzoni from Microfinanza opened the conference by presenting the challenges and objectives from the Italian perspective of this final stage of the project.
Yiorgos Alexopoulos, coordinator and main project partner for the Agricultural University of Athens, opened the discussion on some key aspects of the project’s implementation. Through YES!, partners have had the opportunity to work with a wide range of local partners, using a holistic approach to understand the needs of unemployed young people in terms of training, career guidance, support for business creation, and mentoring, i.e., in almost all sectors of the labor market.
The project has enabled the development of partner networks, expanding the services and activities of associated facilities to other regions, specifically among the less developed ones, involving different and new target groups. Thus, the project has faced external difficulties but has been able to adapt and rethink activities for greater effectiveness.
In the second part of the workshop, Cristiana Gaita, representing the fund, compared the different approaches of the partners, focusing on the project’s impact, how it was measured, the relevance of the proposed activities, and how the partners were able to cope with the various difficulties encountered along the way.
The second day of the conference was introduced by Giampietro Pizzo, president of Microfinanza, who presented some data on the condition of unemployed young people in Italy, seeking to outline new project perspectives and proposing a new response to the phenomenon of unemployed young people who, in Italy, as in other EU countries, continue to grow.
Gianluca Bombarda, Director of the EEA & Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment, presented some of the Fund’s achievements and prospects, announcing the main themes of the next program, with the same objective of reducing the social and economic gap for vulnerable groups, economically marginalized regions, and underfunded sectors.
Some territorial partners such as Laimomo, Cefal, Educativa di strada, and Bangheran, who operate in the Emilia-Romagna region and work with the same target group, were invited to the workshop. They presented their approach to people, non-formal education, access to digital skills, and the “remotivation” of young people through training and integration into the labor market. The experiences presented have been implemented in urban and rural contexts, and disadvantaged neighborhoods, involving very different target groups of individuals.
One of the common elements that emerged in the debate is the need to create permanent territorial services that provide continuous support without being tied to a project logic. It is essential to start from a dialogue with territorial operators and employment agencies and to coordinate existing services in the territory regarding career guidance, support for business creation, and training.
During our experience in the YES! project, we have seen the importance of providing services adapted to beneficiaries, pathways capable of adapting to the labor market, and young people with potential present in the territories.
The next project conference will be in Barcelona!
