Trust for Social Achievement Foundation presented one of its key projects aimed at the labor market and the employment of vulnerable youth – Earning by Learning during a two-day workshop in April, in which non-governmental and local municipal organizations participated. working with disadvantaged people. The seminar was held within the framework of the Youth Center in Plovdiv created under the project of the same name of Local development, poverty reduction and improved inclusion of vulnerable groups program financed by the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area.
The main focus of the meeting was on working with disadvantaged youth and inequalities in society, educational activities to prevent early marriages in the Roma community, joint activities to exchange experiences, drug addiction prevention, problems in small settlements and a sharing network of information.
In addition to NGOs, among those present were representatives of the Ministry of Education, the Municipality of Plovdiv, as well as Georgi Tityukov – Deputy Mayor for “Sports, Youth Activities and Social Policy”, who is also the head of the project.
Donka Kyoseva and Princessa Ivanova are the two girls participating in the project, for whom work opportunities were found at the youth center in Plovdiv. They were supported in the application process as well as once they had already started work. Girls shared their valuable personal experience during the seminar and the confrontation with societal prejudices, as well as how they deal with them as young women, representatives of the Roma ethnicity.
In order to better understand the role of the activities of Earning by Learning project during its practical presentation, the participants of the workshop were divided into groups, each of them focusing on a certain problem that young people and people from vulnerable groups meet.
The second day of the seminar was dedicated to the problems of Roma women, where the services of Earning by Learning project were also presented, such as the trainings and the individual approach to each participant. They are a good basis for achieving better results and personal growth, which is precisely why the stories of a number of Roma youth, examples of successful implementation, who have already been supported by the project, were shared.