From 18th to 28th April 2022, in Athens, Greece, the project “Being Young in the COVID19 pandemic: Let’s change your NEET status and mindset” took place. This Erasmus+ youth exchange is developed to support youngsters to understand marginalized youth groups and missing link with the society they live in. More than 36 young people from 7 countries – Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Morocco, Italy, Estonia, Albania and Romania – participated in the training.
After the outbreak of Covid-19 our lives were shaken and the various professional sectors underwent frightening changes, freezing in all sectors and especially in the already degraded youth professional sector. Evidence from previous labor market crises suggests that a difficult start for young job seekers poses a higher risk of unemployment and lower wage expectations for the rest of their lives especially when these seekers are NEETs. He /she is ‘Disengaged’, ‘undecided’ and ‘unable to find work or training’ this is how the society indicates those people that they are stuck at home without being engaged in work, study, training. The disparity always occurs with respect to certain social categories with issues such as ethnicity, immigration, financial situation, disability, and so on. Educational inequality leads to masses of unemployed young people and unused youth labor. The EU commission recognizes NEET phenomenon and Early School Leaving as priorities and issues to solve in their strategy 2014 -2020 and now sets under the umbrella of Inclusion and Diversity these two issues.
The overall objective of the project is to empower NEET’s to CHANGE MIND by the help of youth workers that they will take part by improving NEET’s attainment in formal education and training helping them to discover their learning style and their different multiple intelligences, empowering NEET’s to build self esteem and leadership skills by uncovering their own skills, creating awareness about the risks of early school leaving, providing with new knowledge to create a good CV and a targeted cover letter, preparation for work and careers advice and guidance, learning new skills, knowledge, and competences to release them from the status of NEET and get out home, informing them about labour market requirements by expert recruiters, embracing young people coming from sensitive parts of the society from refugees’ and migrants’ background. Other goals like strengthening values like volunteerism, solidarity, democracy, friendship, between the participants in an intercultural dialogue and learning the each from the other in a win-win education • to help them to feel their European identity “United in diversity“ were also achieved among the participants during the project.