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KotoTyö Project – Work as an Integration Tool

The project aims at integrating immigrants into Finnish society through work.

Project objectives

  • to develop the reception of refugees in cooperation with various actors
  • increase municipal, corporate and communal awareness of reception and employment of refugees
  • enhance networking opportunities for refugees 
  • promote positive ethnic interaction

Target groups

  • immigrants, refugees in particular
  • municipalities
  • corporations
  • organisations

Activities

  • training for immigrants: training especially for refugees
  • training for municipalities: training and information for municipalities about reception of refugees 
  • training for corporations: training provided for corporations who employ refugees and have regard to their background
  •  organisational involvement in the various stages of integration

Project Goal

Challenges:

  • Asylum seekers and their status (on what grounds each person has a permission to live in Finland?). 
  • The target groups of European Refugee Fund and The European Integration Fund are sometimes very near to each other in relation to the Finnish immigration law. These two funds cannot offer direct support to same target groups. 
  • At the same time we develop models that must function with all immigrant groups. This has been challenging, but we have achieved good results.

Who benefits

  • Refugees
  • Asylum seekers
  • Immigrants
  • Companies, workplaces
  • Municipal offices and civil servants
  • All above mentioned groups benefit throughout Finland
  • we will market our project models to European countries during autumn 2011:
  1. MODEL OF EFFICIENT EMPLOYMENT FOR REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS, including our EMPLOYMENT EDUCATION MODEL
  2. MODEL OF AN EFFICIENT COOPERATION DURING INTEGRATION OF REFUGEES

 

How it works

Work is the best integration method, because:

  • refugees & immigrants use Finnish language every day at work
  • refugees & immigrants network with Finnish people at work, this promotes good ethnic relationships and positive attitudes towards immigration
  • when refugees find work, people are more willing to receive refugees to local areas

We have developed good practices and excellent models:

  • we remove obstacles of professional development and employment
  • how our course model works: 2 efficient Contact teaching modules and a 5 month long On-the-job learning module are a good combination
  • On-the-job learning gives companies and foremen a low-risk chance to see what refugees can do at the workplace, this lowers the threshold to employ refugees after the module
  • refugees are a good pool of work force, when certain help is provided for them in the workplace
  • refugee organisations can help to employ refugees
  • public sector and citizen organisations can be a step toward employment

Results

  • We have educated over 1 000 Finnish persons about refugee related issues
  • 113 refugees, immigrants have participated in our employment education courses
  • We have provided free education for companies about multicultural workplace, multicultural leadership, multicultural customer service etc.
  • municipal authorities and companies have been very interested to participate in our project and model development
  • we promote cooperation between refugees (direct target group)  and the above mentioned (indirect target group)

 

Evaluation

  • Project evaluations by The ELY Centre
  • European Refugee Fund inspects our project every year, Ministry of Interior Affairs
  • Project’s board members represent all of our target groups: refugee organisation, professional organisations, adult education schools, immigration authorities, public officials, municipal officials in North Ostrobothnia etc.
  • Our refugee educations are monitored by ELY Centre’s adult learning officials, who control course quality (reports, student feedback, how many students are employed during the course). They also arrange inspection visits to the schools. They report all results to the finish Ministry of Education and Work.

 

Funding and resources

  • We are funded 50 % by the European Refugee fund and 50 % by The ELY Centre of North Ostrobothnia
  • Annual budgets: year 2009: 140 000 €, year 2010: 220 000 €, year 2011:  200 000 € = 560 000 €.
  • Two workers: project manager and project assistant, who are extremely dedicated and hard working.

 

About this good practice

Details

Posted by
Kaarle Kurki
Author

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