Employment, the “song” of life

“You may write the song of your life”. It’s the slogan of the initiative of Caritas Spain, Spanish Red Cross and Roma Secretariat Foundation presented in Madrid a few days ago. “Would you like to write the words of your future?” is the title of the campaign linked to the idea of music: young people are tasked with writing the lyrics of the song, while entrepreneurs will compose the music. With this joint initiative, the three organizations intend to reach a twofold purpose: to spread knowledge on their commitment to promote the job placement of young people experiencing difficulties at social level and focus the attention of enterprises in particular on the need to cooperate for this kind of initiative. In Spain youth unemployment reaches worrying levels, overcoming the 50% threshold. According to Caritas, Red Cross and Roma Secretariat, among the factors that boost unemployment figure lack of knowledge among the youth of the labour market and mechanisms for finding a job, skills not suited to the demands of the labour market, lack of professional qualification. Musical videos to speak of the future. The focus of the campaign, co-financed by the European Social Fund and by the Ministry of Labour and social security, are a set of music videos with youths participating in Caritas, Spanish Red Cross and Roma Secretariat Foundation, along with the band “Urban Conscience”. The videos that will be released extensively throughout the last months of 2014, are available, along with the rest of the awareness campaign materials produced by the Opera Prima agency on the website www.ponemoslamusica.org. The Twitter hashtag for the campaign is:: #ponemoslamusica. María José Molina and Antolín Romero, who presented the programme: “Here is work” by Rtve, moderated the meeting for the presentation of the campaign with panel contributions by Sebastián Mora, general Secretary of Caritas Spain; Maika Sánchez, director of the Job Plan for vulnerable groups of the Spanish Red Cross and Isidro Rodríguez, director of the Foundation Roma Secretariat. Members of the group “Urban Conscience”, who proposed a musical background for the video of the campaign, also attended the presentation. Commitments for job placement. Almost 50 thousand young people have received support in 2013. The job placement of young people in situations of social difficulty is a priority for Caritas, Red Cross and Roma Secretariat in their strategies for the fight against poverty and inequalities. In particular, during 2013, 48.546 young people under 29 have taken part in programs implemented by the three organizations to further the job placement and social integration of people at risk of exclusion. Thanks to the programs, 5.170 of them have managed to access the job market while 15.489 have improved their working skills and their job marketability. Moreover, thanks to the employment support of the three organizations over the past years some twenty enterprises and self-employment initiatives have been set up. Fight on discrimination. The cooperation of Caritas Spain, and Foundation Roma Secretariat in the realization of the public awareness initiative on youth labour is part of the major experience of joint commitment furthered by the three organizations since the year 2000 as counterparts in Spain of the operative Program of the fight against discrimination funded by the European Social Fund through the Ministry of Labour and social security. This Fund is a tool of the European Union to support Member States’ policies in pursuit of social integration goals, of the fight on discrimination, promotion of gender equality, education and training, with special attention to the access to employment of disadvantaged people.