The EU.CAP project focuses on improving equality of opportunity by improving the employability and active participation of people with mild disabilities in the mainstream economy. The target audience is:1. persons under 30 years of age with mild intellectual disabilities, physical and / or sensory disabilities, who are likely to fit into a traditional work environment with (possibly) slight adaptations in situ (mobility, workplace, technologies) adapted ...). This is the priority target audience.2. social workers wishing to be trained in the use of a socio-educational tool for the target audience 1EU.CAP aims to improve the professional profile of people with disabilities and their suitability for the job market. It aims for long-lasting benefits for individuals and partner organizations by developing an integration model based on the good practices detected in the employability of risk groups. The best practices selected will be integrated into the socio-pedagogical tool that will promote quality and excellence.EU.CAP wishes to promote and develop with its priority target audience skills (know-how) and integration skills (know-how) in the workplace by combining observation courses, training and employment. It will be a process of maximum 15 months managed as part of a specialized job coaching.A specific methodological tool will be built in four stages:1: Identify good practices in the area of ​​employability of people with low mobility in the Member States2: Check the timeliness and feasibility of transferring good practices.3: Develop, test and implement a methodological tool of coaching specialized in various sectors of activity. This methodological tool will have but for:- Help the person with a disability, their profile, their professional profile, their need for training and / or the most effective way job market;- to facilitate support for socio-professional integration in companies by specializing the job coach in the realities of disability: articulate the learning time, the collective life time and the individual steps for the trainee to the evolution 'insert socially, to discover concretely a job, to become familiar with the realities of professional life and, finally, to gain access to employment.4: Organizer of a pilot training for 12 social workers wishing to specialize in the professional integration of people with disabilities.At the end of the project, a repository of training and skills will be freely available to professionals of integration and disability. A series of policy actions will then be sensitized to States and civil society on the issue of employment of people with mild disabilities.

The PREG-EQUAL project addresses the horizontal priority of Social Inclusion and aims at promoting equity and combating all types of discrimination based on disability and gender. Reproductive, Pregnancy and Maternal Health is a priority for WHO, Unicef, the Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations and all member-states. Women with disability live not only difficulties in access but also disappointment and bad experiences concerning “emotional well being and support, effective information dissemination, appropriate communication and understanding, involvement in decision making and support to build respect and trusting relationships with health care providers” (M., 2018). Erasmus+ states as a priority “promote the participation of people from disadvantaged groups, with less opportunities and/or with special needs, in order to potentiate equity and inclusion” (Priorities 2018). General aims: 1. Enhance life quality of women with disability and their families; 2. Promote inclusion, equity and their participation in civil society; 3. Enhance their participation skills, health knowledge and behaviours; 4. Enhance health professional skills concerning relation to people with disabilities; 5. Develop VET tailored answers related to real in job needs in the area of disability and health. Specific aims: 1. Foment knowledge and consciousness for women with disability on reproductive matters, Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy (VIP), sexual health, pregnancy, maternity healthy behaviours and emotional support; 2. Improve psychological, emotional support and informational support for women with disability by empowering their families and sexual/marital partners; 3. Improve better health care services and psychological and emotional support for women with disability by preparing health professionals to effectively communicate, disseminate information and create trustful relations; 4. Collect data in the partner countries national wide to assess numbers of women with disability in pre-natal and maternity care public health system and evaluate the quality of care. The tangible results will be: O1) Women with Disability and Empowerment on Reproductive Choices and Maternity - tailored training program to inform and empower women with disability on reproductive choices, VIP, sexual health, pregnancy health, maternity rights, obligations and public health services (45 participants); O2) Families and the Importance to Support Reproductive Choices and Maternity of Women with Disability - tailored training program to families and sexual/marital partners of women with disability to empower them to better support and inform these women (30 participants); O3) Health Professionals and Women with Disability – The Right to Information, Knowledge and Quality of Services – high quality training to help professionals better support and inform women with disability, communicate effectively, build a respect and trustful relation, specificities of intellectual disability like understanding information, type of information that is more appropriate, main doubts and concerns and the importance of involving family (40 participants); O4) PREG-EQUAL: Women with disability - The Right to Information, Knowledge and Quality on Prevention and Accompaniment in Pregnancy – results and analysis of a research carried out nationally in each country to assess conditions and quality of service that is given to women with disability in pre-natal and maternal public services (at least a 65% respondent rate per country). The project will also include a B-Mobility of VET Learners that involves 12 participants from the target-groups divided as following: 1 health professional, 2 women with disability and 1 familiar or sexual/marital partner to attend a training activity, led by the CDF in october 2019, on “Pre-Natal Care and Maternity Care, Reproductive Choices and Fundamental Rights”. It will include the approach to the theme by experts from CDF and the Faculty of Psychology from the UC, visits to the Risk Unit of Daniel de Matos Maternity, other Maternal Care centres and VET institutions for people with disability. The added value of the activity is directly involving the target-groups, particularly women with disability and their families, in learning opportunities abroad allowing them to reflect themselves in the European space and promoting a sense of world citizenship. 5 Transnational Meetings are strategically scheduled approximately each 6 months to monitor the development and good quality of the IO and plan the implementation of further activities and products. A Dissemination Plan will be carried out to make the project Visible, Create and Raise Awareness, Promote the results and Engage participants, key stakeholders, policy makers and Ministries. Four multiplier events will be developed bringing to discussion all parties at international scale to divulge the results and the publications of the Training Manuals and the PREG-EQUAL

An informal carer is someone who supports a family member, spouse, partner, relative or friend of any age who needs help and support to manage a range of daily living tasks. Distinct from paid care workers, carers receive no wage for the support they provide. In Europe, 80% of all care is provided by informal carers (Eurocarers). Due to increasing migration flows it is now common to find carers across Europe who have a migrant background (CWMB). CWMB, in common with carers more generally, work tirelessly in support of those they care for, often without recognition and to the detriment of their own health and well-being but CWMB are known to experience unique challenges in accessing support services, even more when they are in an undocumented status. These challenges arise in the main from a lack of self-identification among migrants of their status as carers and hence an absence of policy recognition of their needs and rights, compounded by stereotypical assumptions of how their needs are, or should be, met. Also, we could argue that CWMBs face in fact a “double disadvantage” or “double fragility”, with their rights not yet fully recognized as carers, and with a higher risk of social exclusion as migrants. The CO.S.M.I.C. project will develop and test methods and tools to support CWMB and professionals working with them, in order to: increase recognition and self-identification, support access to available services and improving the attention to cultural diversity in existing services. The project will adopt a user-led approach with CWMB directly involved as contributors and reviewers in every stage of the process, to make sure that the outcomes developed are actually respondent to the needs of the final beneficiaries (themselves). The tangible results, the project will make available: 1. An awareness rising package for carers with migrant backgrounds (CWMB) 2. An informative pack for migrant communities 3. A face-to-face training package for professionals, which will be piloted at local level. 4. A MOOC (massive open online course) for professionals 5. More specifically: Partners are: Parorendealliansen /Norwegian alliance for informal carers (project applicant): an umbrella organization working for better carers rights and conditions; ANS – an Italian NGO specifically focused on training and support of informal carers; Associazione C'ENTRO: an umbrella organisation gathering different non-profit entities across Italy; KMOP, one of the oldest Greek NGOs with 40 years of experience in the provision of services to disadvantaged groups and The Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the University of Ljubljana - Slovenia. Expected impacts include: an increased offer of opportunities to a dedicated support intervention for migrant informal carers in the community (during and after the project implementation); improved support and reduced stigma will result in reduced negative impacts on the physical and mental health of the migrant carers and thus a lower burden on community social and health care services and enhanced social cohesion will be and equal opportunities will be increased within local communities.

Background Throughout Europe, informal carers cover 80% of long-term care. Family members are the largest care providers for older, frail, disabled and chronically ill people of all ages. However, caring for a loved one often comes with a considerable personal cost to family carers, including many financial, professional, health and social consequences. Most of informal carers are at risk of social exclusion and there is a need to help them to move from social isolation to active participation. As having unpaid caregiving responsibilities is often undervalued, there is also a need to raise informal carers' profile for themselves, and also for the society as a whole, by developing and validating the large set of skills that are required to be an informal carer. Main objective the CareEr project aims at empowering informal carers through a new training device created by and for informal carers. Based on three areas of key competences and self-assessment, CareEr will contribute to improve informal carers' condition as well as the quality of informal care. Description of activities First of all, the capital letter E of 'CareEr' stands for 'Engaging' and 'Empowering' informal carers. in total, 105 informal carers from 7 EU countries will participate in the CareEr project. Some of them will be engaged in local focus groups and 7 of them (one per participating country) will travel to Belgium, Greece and Italy to make their voice heard during the co-development phase of the CareEr training device. Empowerment also stems from the knowledge and competences that they will gain through their participation in three tailor-made training modules conducted by qualified trainers: 12 trainers will take part in a transnational training for trainers in order to enable them to master this new training device. Finally, in the context of free movement between countries, Empowerment will also result from achieving 'mutual recognition of validated skills' in the European labour market. The capital letter E also stands for the 'e-platform' that will be co-designed from the orientation taken in the Strategic focus groups. This new gaming-based virtual tool will contribute to help informal carers to move from isolation to a connected community of European informal carers and therefore, raise their awareness of the fact that they play an important role in the European care sectors. From this e-platform, they will be able to access learning materials in their own language, including e-learning and self-evaluation tools. Finally, CareEr also refers to career prospects that any informal carer should be allowed to have. As such, the CareEr project will support young carers and carers in employment to combine their caregiving responsibilities with their study or their job. For those in unemployment, CareEr will contribute to bridge the gap between the informal and the formal care sector and to increase informal carers work readiness. CareEr will link to previous EU projects and will up-to-date effective skills recognition tools dedicated to informal carers in order to make them more visible and attractive on the labour market. Impact The consortium made of European Civil Society organisations engaged in the care sector, a local authority and a university, aims at delivering innovative training materials including a training tool based on a e-platform enabling informal carers to improve their knowledge and competences. CareEr will contribute to improve the quality of informal care in Europe.

The project had a partnership made of 5 European countries Italy, France, Belgium, Romania and Portugal, and had Fondazione IRPEA from Padua, Italy, as coordinator.The focus of the “DARE” pathway were the services for home assistance as central element to be reformed in the wider context of the assistance to the person, a choice motivated by the conviction that the support the persons in difficulty and their carers might receive at home influences their right to be cared at home, avoiding also the recoveries in residential structures, already not enough compared to the number of requests.The perspective of a change of paradigm in this sector, focused on the a holistic approach regarding the needs and the resources, was confirmed during the whole project. Starting from the obvious lack of dedicated public resources, in most of the European countries, and from the deep changes appeared in the modern families, the project facilitated the approach to very diversified initiatives.The 5 visits for the exchange of best practices – to Bucharest, Brussel, Bastia, Coimbra and Padua – involved 106 available places – but some of the professionals participated to more than one visit. The two internal Focus Groups (in Bucharest and Padua), the Final Workshop (Padua) and the intense exchanges via e-mail between the project coordinators of each partner confirmed that the objective of creating a “community of practice” had been reached: the group will continue to pay attention to the innovation in the sector of home and residential care and will search for opportunities of building projects centered on the transfer of best practices, perhaps also enlarging the partnership to other countries.The diversity of the professional profiles involved was another objective reached (directors and coordinators of organizations associated to the partners, professional educators, healthcare technicians, home assistants, responsible for the communication, occupational therapists, psychologists, physiotherapists, experts from the planning department). In terms of direct impact, the opportunity to participate to one or more visits facilitated a training “on the field” and contributed to the widening of their vision on the utility and the functioning of integrated services, which also imply the rethinking of the necessary competences. Besides, the direct contact with different cultures of approaching care and cure gave them the elements of a necessary intercultural approach.As it emerged from the Observation Form of the Best Practices, filled in by each partner after each visit, TRAINING and CONTINUOUS REQUALIFICATION of the professionals from the different home assistance services, are essential in order to educate them to the vision of the integration of interventions/services meant to improve the quality of life of the assisted persons and to favor the social inclusion process of the disadvantaged persons.Through the continuous dissemination activity, around 36.000 persons were reached, a public made mainly of experts from the third sector at the national and European level, local/national/European stakeholders, professionals from the healthcare and education sector, public institutions.The partnership had started from an initial situation of differentiation both due to the type of organization and to the integration level of the existing services. According to the options expressed by the partners during the final Focus Group, the model of the “integrated desks/CARE HUBS” remains the ideal one needed for a real innovation of the assistance services (domiciliary and non), even if differentiated according to the culture and to the existing legislation of each country.The collection of the 26 best practices in a e-book (available in EPUB and PDF format) allowed a deeper reflection on the models and initiatives observed and the collection of the organizations and the territories involved.The partnership followed the double meaning of the word “DARE”: “to donate”, in Italian, and therefore aim at the quality of life of the persons for whom, as professionals, we are responsible, and “to dare”, in English, as a really sustainable welfare allover Europe, homogenous in terms of quality and quantity, cannot be possible without OVERCOMING the traditional division of the assistance and care services based on “target groups”.Being convinced that that innovation is possible event with small (but strategic) steps, the idea of foreseeing, on more territories, the creation of Integrated Desks for care and assistance (not only domiciliary one) remains an objective to be carried on. The “DARE” project helped the partners also in facing the real dimensions of the needed changes in order to reach, even partly, this objective.