The APEL service attacks poverty and exclusion on all fronts!
Timisoara, Roumania
A social and economic integration service rescues disadvantaged young Romanians
In 2001 the PARADA Foundation (a humanitarian aid NGO helping street youth, established in Bucarest 1996) creates APEL, a training service for employability.
It was Mr. Franco Aloisio, actually vice-president of PARADA and president of APEL who, with his own expertise in the subject, and in cooperation with Italian and French experts helped create what is now a service of excellence.
Indeed, with support and funding from various private and public organizations, APEL, Resource Center for the Development of Social Economy, detaches from PARADA in 2006 to become an independent association specializing in the employability of disadvantaged youth, working in Bucharest and Timisoara.
The APEL team, composed of a coordinator and two professional integration advisers, works in cooperation with external stakeholders (some of whom are volunteers) specialized in different areas such as social assistance, psychology, economics, labor market analysis, communication...
Through various projects, it brings real solutions to professional integration problems both of employees and employers, and promotes professional and social integration through communication campaigns.
APEL activities: experimentation and innovation take up the field challenge.
With its multidisciplinary team and continuing dialogue with various organizations, APEL provides effective responses to exclusion and marginalization problems.
Multiple actions facilitating youth access to the labor market: the key to success for APEL.
First a training service for professional integration, aiming disadvantaged youth (without training, disabled, from very modest backgrounds ...) from 16 years old, APEL provides information, advice and career guidance, including teaching employment search methods and labor legislation, training orientation, and even follow-up after hiring.
APEL also offers financial support for professional qualification and works as a mediator between youth and their future employers.
850 young people have already benefited from these services in Bucharest and Timisoara, each one being followed for about four months.
Another APEL activity targets companies. Working with more than 60 companies, APEL works as a placement agency: ensuring the selection and training of young people, assisting the recently recruited through the integration period and advising companies on legal advantages of hiring youths.
A third aspect relates to students' training in order to meet the labor market demand.
To prevent economic exclusion, the APEL team, with external experts, offers special trainings in high schools helping develop professional vocation and personal skills of students.
A pilot project, "A chance for everyone" realized in Timisoara in 2005 with 90 students was the prelude to the establishment of a structured program of vocational guidance, "A first step towards the labor market."
APEL is also carrying out studies on the marginalization process in the labor market. To spread its method, the service trains advisers to professional integration of disadvantaged youth.
The APEL service bears great importance to the communication on youth integration problems. In addition to the regular dissemination of its studies and actions in the media (newspapers, radio and TV), it is organizing various events (roundtables, conferences, debates, seminars, etc.) and also contributes to related events both national and abroad.
Based on these experiences, APEL began in 2007 in a new adventure: social micro-credit, in order to propose alternative methods to combat poverty and exclusion, and promote the economic integration of excluded persons by creating their own job.
The project, supported by the Romanian National Bank, is applied in Bucharest and Timisoara and targets groups like youth and disadvantaged women. APEL grants the social micro-credits and provides advice and assistance to the beneficiaries for the launching of their enterprises.
In the future, APEL wishes to pursue its action on behalf of disadvantaged populations; flexibility and adaptation to the field's specific needs remain its fundamental characteristics.
So speaks one of its representatives: "Since the creation of the service, efforts have been made to think, rethink and implement our projects in an innovative manner. This led us to train ourselves as flexible actors, capable of assuming risks and failures that any experimental action could encounter. We always keep in mind to imagine for Romania innovative approaches to combating social exclusion and I believe that we have much to learn from each other, as long as we continuously adapt our actions to the current context. "
