1
THE INSTITUTION
Barcelonès District Council is a local territorial character created on March 9, 1988, under the new territorial division established by the Catalan Parliament with Law 6/1987 of 4 April on the local organization of Catalonia, law has been repealed and replaced by Decree 4/2003 of 4 November, which approves the revised text of this Act.
According to this law, the county holds responsibility for cooperation and coordination advisory councils. Also competences are those conferred by Acts of Parliament, according to the type of each of the regions. You can also develop or commission delegated to manage the Government of Catalonia, the corresponding council, municipalities, associations of municipalities and communities, organizations and associations of local authorities.
One of the features that made the existence of the District Council is Barcelonès by Decree 5/1998 was given the power transferred from the defunct Metropolitan Corporation of Barcelona, such as the implementation of major general systems of metropolitan planning and rehabilitation service and management of housing within the limits included in the district.
The County Council comprises the municipalities of Barcelonès Badalona, Barcelona, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Sant Adria de Besos and Santa Coloma de Gramenet.
2
Centre Europa Jove.
One of the youth services we provided to the young people is the Centre Europa Jove.
The Centre Europa Jove (European Youth Centre) is working on providing information about all the possibilities that young people have going to Europe. The county council (Consell Comarcal del Barcelonès) is working together with the municipalities of the five cities forming part of the county: Barcelona, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Badalona, Sant Adrià de Besòs and Santa Coloma de Gramenet. The last three cities are emergent cities that stand in the shadow of Barcelona, therefore we have our central office in Santa Coloma to be able to attend young people there that usually have fewer opportunities or are obliged to go to Barcelona.
We started working in 2003 attending 100 young people of our county, last year we reached almost 3000 youngsters.
We attend young people through different ways: - Traditionally we assess and orientate those youngsters in our office in individual sessions - Group workshops in schools, youth centers, libraries, etc about working abroad, volunteering, participating, learning languages, internships etc in Europe and outside of Europe (during the first 6 months of this year we have offered a total of 75 workshops and have reached 861 young people) This year we offered different series of workshops each with several workshops: Working abroad, Working in Germany, Learning languages, Move around and practice solidarity: http://xurl.es/bxhpb
- Online assessment and online job centre
3
Furthermore we inform and assess youth organizations that want to host or send European volunteers, take part in a Youth exchange or any other European project.
This year we also organized a conference about working abroad with representatives of the British and North American consulate, the French chamber of commerce and a German-Spanish training institution, Eures representatives, local politicians and private agencies that work in this sector. This conference, the “III Jornadas BCN Jove de Treball al l'estranger”, was addressed to people working in job centers, youth workers and people involved in youth politics of our county and all Catalonia: http://xurl.es/c5s30
Through this campaign we improved the opportunity to work in network with other professionals working with youth employment and youth mobility, to improve the possibilities to provide information on European opportunities. Here you can find the presentations of the conference: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/biblioteca/III%20Jornades%20Barcelonesjo ve
We noticed that it is a great way and very efficient to get in touch with young people speaking about Europe if we speak their language and use the same channels they use, leaving traditional paths of information. The results and the growing number of uses of our website, friends in facebook, subscribers of our newsletters etc show us that we are on the right track.
General objectives. The main aim of this project is to inform young people about the possibilities they have (and that in most cases are not known to them) to go abroad. We noticed during the last years working in this field that many people are interested in working abroad, but not consider other options (like European programs such as the European voluntary service or a Leonardo exchange program).
As our office (youth and housing department) is working on improving the youth emancipation, we included the European mobility in our basic working strategies.
Specific objectives. We also noticed that the current economic situation in Spain makes it more difficult for young people to enter or stay in the labor market; therefore many people start to consider the option of going abroad, temporarily or for a longer stay.
Traditionally we informed the young people in our office, but to be able to give more autonomy to the people interested, to be able to reach them through the channels they are used to use and to be able to contact with people that have difficulties to get to our office, we started with our online project.
4
Through this channel we are able to reach more young people and can inform better about the possibilities for young people in Europe.
Target group: The main target group of our activities is young people of our county between 16 and 35 years. Indirectly we reach also people living outside of our county which is reflected in the way we are contacted (by mail, phone or our intranet from people in all Spain or Catalans living abroad who have seen something interesting on our website or the newsletter and want more information about it). We are also a source for other youth organizations in our county and in the whole country that are looking for specific information in this field.
Implementation Give a brief summary of the action and the methods used to reach the objectives.
The online project consists of different strategies:
- Online assessment: Young people and youth organizations can contact us through our website and ask for information here: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/serveis- comarcals/assessories-joves/assessoria-en-mobilitat-europea-joves Within 72 hours maximum we get in touch with the interested person and respond to their question.
5
To improve our internal protocol we organized the 15th of June a training with other youth counselors to exchange best practices and develop a written protocol with certain standards (document is attached), which is quite unique: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/info/agenda/com-podem-fer- un-millor-assessorament-line-als-joves-trobada-dinformadors-juvenils-orien
- Online job centre:
For young people that are interested in working abroad, we offer our online job centre. The main objective is to help young people to find a job (on local level or internationally). Every week we search different job offers (in this case abroad) all over Europe or internationally. We find those jobs using our contacts, the Eurodesk network, the EURES webpage and the EURES advisers, SEPE (the national Spanish public employment service) and their international cooperation programs, national job websites etc. We try to find job offers addressed to people with different training levels and adapted to the needs of our youngsters: some have high qualifications and are able to speak several languages whilst others dropped out of school and don’t have any language facilities. E.g. we try to find international jobs where the Spanish or Catalan language is required.
Those jobs are published online: http://xurl.es/4tc6j
6
Then the young people have the possibility to either access those offers online or get in touch with us to receive more information about those offers, receive an orientation about how to search for work abroad (at our office or online), get help with their CV in different languages, and get informed about other possibilities such as volunteer or do an internship. This European online job center is quite successful and we receive a lot of requests about those job offers.
In September we will launch “Clicjobs” on our website which is a Netvibes application where different online job sites can be visualized at the same time. This tool facilitates the search for jobs at local and international level. At the moment we are at the Beta phase.
- Social networks
We also use different social networks to talk about Europe and the different options for young people. There we publish news, job offers, scholarships, volunteering possibilities that we have been informed of through Eurodesk and our local and international partners:
We have three different Facebook accounts: https://www.facebook.com/barcelonesjove.net https://www.facebook.com/pages/Centre-Europa-Jove/126555754075245 https://www.facebook.com/informadorbarcelonesjove.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CentreEuropaJov http://twitter.com/barcelonesjove
- Web site
Our website is another very powerful tool we use to spread information about Europe. We have a special section for European topics: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/area/europa
There we inform young people about Europe, working, volunteering, studying, travel, work and do an internship, learning languages and cooperation aboard. All this information can also be downloaded as a PDF file.
At the end of each page there can found a link to “link joves” with related websites of this area. http://www.barcelonesjove.net/links/6/Links%20Joves
In the section “Agenda i convocatòries” (agenda and announcements) we inform young people of all the relevant options they have to ask for a scholarship, prizes, youth exchanges, workshops, trainings etc. We keep
7
this section up-to-date every day which makes it a point of reference for our young people.
In the section “Centre Europa Jove” we inform about our workshops, the possibility to receive a personal orientation at our office, international training, the Eurodesk network, our newsletter and a virtual travel guide.
In this section I want to emphasize the section “international experiences” where all the experiences that of young people going abroad from our county can be found since 2003. The most complete sections here are “working abroad” and “EVS”.
All the information we publish on this website comes from different sources such as the Eurodesk network and newsletter, our different local and international partners, etc. A useful tool for getting all this information and being up-to-date is the RSS that all of us working in this field use at a daily base.
- Newsletter
We publish different newsletters with different frequencies:
- Newsletter “Job offers, courses and grants”: weekly (30% of it are European content)
- Newsletter “Young Europe”: monthly (100% European content)
- Newsletter “Young people”: monthly (15% European content)
- Newsletter “CIREJ- young people’s emancipation”: bimonthly, (15% European content)
- Newsletter “News”: 5 editions per year (15% European content)
8
All of the information related to Europe and international issues, we receive from different sources: our participation in Eurodesk, different newsletters from other entities etc.
- Online guides
As we noticed that it is helpful for young people with the intention to go abroad to have more information with more detail available online, and sometimes a kind of guideline, we decided to write some online guides.
On our website at the moment there are two online guides available: One about The European Voluntary service, another one about Working abroad. Currently we are working on another one about studying abroad. http://www.barcelonesjove.net/info/guies-joves/guia-jove-treballar- lestranger http://www.barcelonesjove.net/info/guies-joves/guia-jove-sobre-el-servei- de-voluntariat-europeu
- Youtube channel Barcelonès TeVe
On our Barcelonès TeVe channel we started to record different videos that are of interest for young people going abroad. They are grouped in different sections, the ones that are of interest in European topics are:
- Working abroad: experiences of young people: Young Catalans explain their experiences working throughout Europe. This campaign was started this year and is a very effective way to motivate other young people to go abroad, if they here the voice of
9
other people from the same town that have been in the same situation, being motivated by them. We asked young people that we were in contact with through an information session at our office or that we had virtual contact with (online assessment) to send us a video they made themselves in the place where they a re right now abroad. On the other hand we taped some videos with the help of our journalist making video interviews of young people that have lived an experience abroad and have come back and share their experience. http://www.barcelonesjove.net/teve/cicle-treballar-lestranger-recull- dexperi%C3%A8ncies-vols-que-afegim-la-teva
- Move around the world and practice solidarity: This is a campaign that consists of different workshops, language courses and videos: “ video advices” from organizations and people working in the field of cooperation and solidarity and “video experiences” of young people:
http://www.barcelonesjove.net/teve/mou-te-pel-m%C3%B3n-i- practica-la-solidaritat-el-cas-de-la-sarai-i-la-n%C3%BAria-al- s%C3%A0hara
- Video advices: Professionals explain what is important when going abroad, how to look for a job, what documents you need and a lot more practical information: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/teve/consells-lhora-de-contractar-una- ag%C3%A8ncia-treballar-lestranger
- Barcelonès Jove TeVe: Our “house journalists” explain our different campaigns in a program addressed to our young people. Related to Europe: 5th edition: Move around the world and practice solidarity 9th edition: learning languages without paying a lot of money 12th edition: Everything you have to know before going abroad http://www.barcelonesjove.net/teve/joves-que-volen-trobar-un-pis-tot-el- que-cal-saber
10
For further Information:
Organisation
Name: Consell Comarcal del Barcelonès
Address: C/Tàpies, 4, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
Website: http://www.barcelonesjove.net/
Contact Person in the Organisation
Name: Pedro Martín
Phone: 0034 93 5528336
11