Logo: Independent Living Institute (To www.independentliving.org)

Training as Vehicle to Employment: Newsletter, September 2007

Dear Reader

Welcome to the second common newsletter to the EU wide project ‘Training as Vehicle to Employment’ (TVE).

This project is a two year EU wide project focusing on national government agencies’ traineeships. There are two basic aims:

  1. To promote training positions in the public sector and to open them to persons with disabilities.
  2. To list the training positions that disabled persons can apply

This project is being run in Ireland, Latvia, Germany, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden Poland and Bulgaria. You can find up-to-date information from the international website http://www.independentliving.org/training

Project Update

The project is at its last stage (the project ends in December 2007) and main focus at the moment is to complete a booklet for public employers on how to use traineeships/internships as a recruitment tool in order to increase the opportunities for young qualified persons, including persons with disabilities, to establish themselves in the labour market. The booklet will be published and distributed during the autumn of 2007.

Be sure to visit our website http://www.independentliving.org/training at the end of October. You will then be able to take part of the comparison between several European state agencies’ training positions, disability policies and accessibility work.

TVE at the Freedom Drive in Strasbourg

More than 150 disabled people from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK came together from September 05 to September 07, 2007, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg to raise their voices for equal opportunities.

During the Freedom Drive we presented the TVE project in order to start a network with the MEPs from different countries as well as the disability intergroup of the Parliament.

Participants from the TVE project group informed the MEPs during their national sessions with handouts of the TVE project and had individual talks with some MEPs afterwards.

Hubert Bernard, national coordinator from Germany, met a former participant of an internship, Wasilios Katsioulis, organised by the European Union for people with disabilities. He committed his support to start an ongoing network with the MEPs and the EU-administration. Wasilios Katsioulis now works as representative for disability issues in the German Anti-Discrimination Association (D.A.D.V.).

So what was the outcome of the travel to Strasbourg?

People with disabilities are gaining more and more power and recognition as they are many. Not only the politicians realised more than ever that these people can not be overseen anymore and that they will demand their rights for equal opportunities throughout Europe. The MEPs expressed their interest of an ongoing exchange of information and thoughts.

The next Training as Vehicle to Employment Newsletter will be distributed in October 2007.

TVE project logo

Project documents

Information in Polish

Information in English

Information in Latvian

Information in Spanish

Information in Swedish

Information in German

Information in Greek

Information in Bulgarian

Information in Finnish

Training as Vehicle to Employment, TVE, was a two year project that started in January 2006 and ended in December 2007.

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