Educational Materials for Practitioners providing Opportunities for vulnerable Women’s Employability and Resilience Erasmus Project

Project Title

Educational Materials for Practitioners providing Opportunities for vulnerable Women’s Employability and Resilience

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Gender equality / equal opportunities

Project Summary

EMPOWER (Educational Materials for Practitioners providing Opportunities for vulnerable Women’s Employability and Resilience) was developed by a consortium of 4 skilled and experienced organisations:
1. Inova (UK), SME specialised in gender and skills-building projects
2. KMOP (EL), NGO in social care
3. SIF (LT), NGO in social care
4. VMST (IS), Directorate of Labour
It found its origin in research demonstrating that in times of economic difficulty, such as the recent recession, Support Services for vulnerable adults and particularly for women are often cut. 2015, the year that EMPOWER started its development, formed no exception. Statistics painted a bleak picture of the issues vulnerable women face, within and outside of the EU, preventing them from becoming economically or educationally active:
– 1 in 4 women across Europe experience domestic violence throughout their lifetimes and between 6-10% of women suffer domestic violence in a given year (CoE, 2002)
– 68% of human trafficking victims are women (Eurostat, 2013) and
– A significant proportion of refugee women living in the UK have experienced violence prior to arrival and remain vulnerable to violence in the UK, their country of asylum (Refugee Council, 2012).
There continues to be a need for high quality support and training to vulnerable women at risk of exclusion from the labour market and their Support Workers. The sector strongly relies on volunteers to provide much needed support in the fields of personal empowerment, confidence and employability or entrepreneurship skills. Support Workers have however been overlooked in terms of the type and variety of training they are provided with. Whilst issue-specific training is provided, Support Workers report that they feel less able to support and provide information and guidance on issues relating to employability and entrepreneurship to their female clients.

EMPOWER was initiated to bridge this gap and set itself two main objectives:
1. Equip Support Workers working with vulnerable women with the soft skills training necessary to pass these skills onto women in order to increase their employability and entrepreneurship opportunities.
2. Equip vulnerable women with greater confidence, belief & resilience to succeed economically.
The main activities undertaken to achieve these objectives have been the following:
– A preliminary Needs Analysis to further define the training needs of Support Workers working with vulnerable women and of the vulnerable women themselves to increase employability and entrepreneurship skills and opportunities.
– Development of 3 high-quality Training Programmes (EMPOWER Others – EMPOWER Yourself – EMPOWER Circles) that have ensured to train the project’s target groups in building the necessary soft skills to better support vulnerable women (in the case of Support Workers and volunteers), and to better support themselves (in the case of vulnerable women).
– Development of a set of Facilitator Guidelines to support the delivery of EMPOWER Training Programmes.
– Development of the EMPOWER Learning Hub, an online eLearning platform that contains all training materials developed, extra reading materials and other interesting resources. This platform will remain available as an open access OER.
– Development of the Policymakers Guide – ‘Female Empowerment for Employability – a Guide for Policymakers’ covering lessons learned in EMPOWER and recommendations to improve policy and practice in the field of employability and entrepreneurship training for vulnerable women and Support Workers.
– Multiplier Events to promote EMPOWER project results and to further spread the word about its activities.
– A Final Conference to celebrate the project’s success.

With these activities EMPOWER achieved positive impact among the partners, its participants and beyond, leading to around 23,000 Support Workers, volunteers, vulnerable women, stakeholders and other interested parties directly and indirectly benefiting from the project.

Not only did most of our quantitative targets exceed in numbers, qualitative feedback received from everyone involved has been incredibly positive throughout. Our direct target groups enjoy increased skills, competences and knowledge about employability and entrepreneurship skills together with added soft skills and strengths-based training in resilience and positive psychology.
The project funding may have come to an end, but EMPOWER will continue. The partnership has received broad interest from a number of organisations to continue delivering the programme with their clients and/or employees. The project has hereby grown its capacity for support, which is in turn expected to lead to helping an increasingly large number of vulnerable women back into employment, education or self-employment.

“The EMPOWER Course has been such a big help to me. I learnt that with perseverance you can do anything you put your mind to. There is never a problem, it’s a challenge.’

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 309476,38 Eur

Project Coordinator

INOVA CONSULTANCY LTD & Country: UK

Project Partners

• VINNUMALASTOFNUN
• SOCIALINIU INOVACIJU FONDAS
• KENTRO MERIMNAS OIKOGENEIAS KAI PAIDIOU