Radio România Internațional

Tag: vocational training

  • Florentina’s Nest

    Florentina’s Nest

    Florentina Baloș,
    the president of the Barrel of Smiles Association, has long been one of RRI’s
    friends, as over the years we have carefully followed her charity initiatives
    and other projects. Today’s edition is devoted to a visionary project designed
    to provide assistance to young people with disabilities, who no longer have
    access to education. The project seeks to prepare these young people for the
    hardships of life and train them to find a job.


    More details
    from Florentina Baloș herself.


    Titled
    Florentina’s Little House or Florentina’s Nest, the project will run in the
    first half of the year and primarily addresses special children who’ve
    graduated 10 grades. We offer them a segment allowing them to enroll in
    vocational training, focusing very much on the specific skills of each kid. We
    also have parents who stay with their children. Our project addresses those
    parents who have no other option for their children. We’re talking about
    adults, who are over 18 years of age, which makes them mature and developed
    enough to take care of themselves. But they are always in need of assistance.
    Parents often have no other choice: how can they carry on with their
    professional and social lives? It’s very hard on them. Hence the idea of our
    little house, where they can leave their children for the day.


    And since school
    is getting increasingly difficult to pursue for underprivileged children,
    Florentina Baloș has other plans as well.


    There’s a lot
    more we’re doing. Admittedly, 80% of our actions focus on this segment, but we
    also have the Magic Room, as I like to call it, where we provide support to
    children who need tutoring, children from disenfranchised backgrounds. Not
    everyone is a genius, not everyone gets to get a double degree, but we all need
    to graduate and pick a trade. And it’s really important children should learn
    how to study, to know they’re not alone and should not drop out of school. That
    they have to see things through, to earn a living when they grow up.


    It’s a long-term
    process, at times failing to produce the tangible results they seek, Florentina
    Baloș explains.


    There’s no age
    limit for children who graduate the 10th grade, because it would be
    quite difficult for us to accommodate that. So, all are welcome then. Our other
    initiative addressing underprivileged children tries to assist them at least
    until they graduate high-school. They have to graduate those 12 grades! Or
    enroll in a vocational school, but the important thing is to continue their
    studies. So, we’ll continue to help them until they graduate 12 or 13 grades.
    And I repeat, there’s no age limit for special children, because in the end
    that adult will be a child who needs support.


    We asked
    Florentina Baloș if she considers developing closer relations with state
    schooling units, in order to expand her initiatives:


    We’ve started
    small. We have an excellent cooperation with the school for special children in
    District 6, where we work with teachers who are engaged, adorable, they love
    what they do and the children they care for every day. So, we developed and
    planned many activities last year and for this year as well. And, step by step,
    we will also elaborate activities in this area as well.


    Like most other
    initiatives of Florentina Baloș, this one as well focuses on raising awareness
    regarding challenges. Solving a problem first needs understanding the problem,
    and this new project seeks to help families that care for young people with
    disabilities or those who cannot afford supporting children in school, amidst
    the ever-growing demands of the educational system. Florentina Baloș’s
    determination remains inspiring, as always! (VP)





  • Hiring unemployed people aged over 45

    Hiring unemployed people aged over 45

    Getting a good
    employment agreement has in recent years become an impossible mission for many
    Romanians, especially people over 45 years of age, who at present account for
    28% of the total number of unemployed people in Romania. No longer in their
    prime, these people are unemployed at a time when their value, experience and
    skills, accrued over the years, should be rewarded. According to the National
    Employment Agency, at the end of 2015, 56.56% of Romania’s unemployed were over
    40 years of age. Of these, more than half were aged 50 or above. The majority
    of the unemployed now look to vocational retraining schemes, trying to learn a
    new trade after a lifetime of working in the same place. But this too is no
    guarantee they will get a job.

    Such is the case of Vasile from Piatra Neamt. He
    is 50 years old and has been unemployed for several years:


    In the last three years since I’ve been
    unemployed, I have been looking for a job, but it’s been very difficult. People
    over 50 have a hard time getting a job. You go to an employer, he says he will
    hire you, you file your resume and you wait, but in the end you don’t get an
    answer. They hire instead people who are younger than you. After I applied for
    unemployment benefits, I took up vocational retraining classes: I studied
    accounting and IT, but even with these diplomas, nobody would hire me.
    Employers look for qualified people, they don’t want people to train themselves.


    Constantin is from Bucharest, is 48
    years old and he too took up vocational retraining classes, which have done
    little to earn him a job:


    In 2010 I was laid off and offered no
    position to retrain for. The state spends huge amounts of money simply because
    it doesn’t provide training for other trades that are sought for on the labour
    market. The Labour Ministry should work with other public institutions. They
    achieve little by training people if they can’t place them on the market. They
    don’t help you with anything. They give you employment benefits all year round.
    Instead of training people, they would rather hire people straight off the
    market. If you don’t have the specific skills, your chances of getting a job
    are slim.


    Therefore, people like Constantin
    and Vasile face a lot of discrimination, even though the Romanian legislation
    specifically forbids age-specific discrimination in the field of employment.
    The anti-discrimination coalition does help you identify the public authorities
    where you can file a complaint describing the inequity or bias you are faced
    with. Teodora Ion-Rotaru, a PR and communication officer with the
    anti-discrimination Coalition has more:



    The workplace is the only other place
    where discrimination becomes more visible. Elderly people are faced with such
    forms of discrimination, but we, at the Anti-discrimination Coalition can help
    them, by providing them free-of-charge judicial counseling, straight on our
    website, anti-discriminare.ro. These people can talk directly to a legal expert
    about the methods they can use to prove they have been subject to age-specific
    discrimination. They can also learn about the kind of evidence they can provide
    in this respect, whether the situation they are confronted with actually
    involves forms of discrimination, as well as about the institutions they might
    further refer their case to. European studies show that Romania is one of the
    European countries with the highest rates of discrimination. On the other hand,
    Romanians’ perception of discrimination is lower. Romanians don’t perceive
    discrimination the same way as other foreign citizens, neither do they fully
    know their rights in order to be able to defend themselves when discriminated
    against. It’s very important that people should notify the authorities when
    facing discrimination. The anti-discrimination law is there, it is
    comprehensive and covers the labour field. But in order to be enforced, we
    encourage people facing discrimination to address the Anti-discrimination
    Coalition and go to the relevant institutions to seek justice.


    Every year, the
    National Employment Agency organizes vocational training programs, aimed at
    ensuring the growth and diversification of professional skills, with the
    purpose of guaranteeing mobility and reintegration on the labour market. In
    2016 the Agency will organize 2,200 such programs for approximately 42,000
    people, who will benefit from free-of-charge professional training. Last year,
    as a result of the measures taken under the Employment Program, some 108
    thousand people aged over 45 were reintegrated on the labour market.

    Daniela
    Stirbu, the head of the Communication Department with the National Employment
    Agency, gave us more details:

    In March 2016, there were 171 vocational
    training programs running nationwide, attended by 3252 people. Most such
    programs qualify people as salesclerks, cooks, data operators, plumbers,
    hairdressers, manicurists or waiters. Most people who attended these classes
    were from Brasov, Bihor, Hunedoara, Mures and Covasna counties. For further
    details, people can address our territorial branches in the area of their
    residence.



    All employers who
    hire various categories of unemployed people will this year be given subsidies
    ranging from 110 to 170 euros for every person they hire. Basically, with the
    help of these state subsidies, employers will be able to cover part of their
    salaries and still save money. In the first eight months of last year, as a
    result of enforcing the measures provided in the Employment Program, 8,812
    people aged over 45 years and 142 people who can retire within five years were
    reintegrated on the labour market.

  • The Volunteer Challenge

    The Volunteer Challenge

    The Ajungem Mari educational program emerged one year ago out of the wish to help children from foster care centers in Bucharest become responsible adults, self-sufficient and confident in their own strength. With long term educational programs suited to their needs, they can overcome the trauma of institutionalization or of life in broken and often abusive homes. This is the goal of the Ajungem Mari organization, whose name means ‘we’re growing up’. Iarina Stefanescu, founder of the program, told us about it:



    “The program started after I had been involved in an English language program in social centers. I realized that two hours of education through play for children, with volunteers who encourage them interactively, meant a lot to them, providing them with knowledge and values.”



    Iulia Blaga and Andreea Dumitru both volunteered for the program, but they were not content doing what they started, running cinema and creative writing workshops. They took the children to movies, visited museums and bookshops, planted flowers and painted, took them to the park, showed them a city that many of them had never had the opportunity to discover. In their opinion, one of the greatest problems of the system is the lack of motivation, both for children and for staff. Andreea Dumitru:



    “The children are not motivated to take steps towards their future, maybe because they don’t have many alternatives at the center or even outside it. It is a known fact that, when they turn 18, they go into a total unknown. We, volunteers, are trying to show them that everyone has their own way to make it in life, that each of us had to choose their own path. I would like these children to understand that things are not predestined, that there are things outside these institutions, that they can develop outside the system. Sometimes we, volunteers, feel that we are just a drop in an ocean, and whatever we do with the children in one hour goes down the drain.”



    Being a volunteer means having quite a few qualities. Perseverance is definitely one of them. Here is Iulia Blaga:



    “You have a lot of work to do with them, but I feel they are very receptive. And I feel sometimes that they will forget tomorrow what you tell them today; but other times, I feel like what we tell them will stay with them forever. One day we showed them Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, they loved it, and one of the kids asked me: ‘Miss, were you there, in the movie?’ I didn’t know what to say, but I guess when you show them a movie, in their minds you were there, with Charlie Chaplin and the team.”



    Here is what Andreea Dumitru told us:



    “I agree, the biggest struggle is with this attitude that the staff passes on to the children: ‘You don’t know anything, you can’t do anything, you won’t manage to do anything in life’. I’m so happy every day when I see the smallest step in the opposite direction. I got very attached to some of the children at the center where I volunteer, but especially to a couple of children who can barely be said to have a family, and I want to work with them on a long term, I think it is the greatest challenge to work with children who are not given a single chance in the beginning, children that were said on the first day to have such a low IQ that they wouldn’t be able to do anything. Also, I want to take them as much as I can out of those centers, to see as many places as I can, to see them flourish. I’m sure they will flourish in a few years, and recover.”



    Iulia Blaga agrees:



    “Even the small steps with grammar can be seen as progress. If you correct them a few times, they get it. I’m trying to look at the small things that they do right. For instance, I do literacy with a boy, and I asked him to respect the time we set to meet, and I can see how he started keeping his promise. We went to the “Grigore Antipa” Natural History Museum, to a large bookshop, and when he saw so many people and books, he was scared and didn’t know how to react. He thought all the children were smarter, cuter, more loved and appreciated than he was. When I took him to the NexTKids International Film Festival, I noticed he was very good with his hands. An artist there was making little skirts from wire, like the characters in the movie, and he made one and gave it to me. I’m thinking I should help him develop this talent.”



    Iarina Stefanescu, founder and manager of the educational program, told us:



    “I’m thinking it would be useful, after we have got to know the children, through the ‘Pass On Your Passion’ volunteer project, to carry out some vocational training, helping us discover their vocation, their skills, help them on a long term. Next we should start implementing the ‘Dare Dream’ project, taking them to factories and company offices, have them talk to people from various environments. Most of the time, the children don’t have role models, and don’t know much about what a profession supposes, so it is natural for them to find it difficult to find their way. Which is why they need people to tell them that they also went through difficulties, but that they made it in the end.”



    The good news is that this program will be expanding outside Bucharest. Timisoara, Iasi, Cluj and Buzau are the next cities where the volunteers in the program are going next.