Workshop C - Session 3

Title: Promoting Social Inclusion and Active Citizenship - Overcoming Barriers Chair: Tom Schuller, Edinburgh University, UK Jorma Turunen, Finnish Adult Education Association, Finland

I would like to present a very concrete project. It is a project for unemployed people in Finland and it is called the Alternative Activities Project.

One of the central areas of activity of the Workers' Educational Association in Finland is helping people to gain control of their lives. This includes learning and training activities aimed at the unemployed and those threatened by unemployment, as well as co-operation with partners in the third sector.

The Alternative Activities Project was launched at the beginning of 1997 and it represents a kind of new dimension in learning activities for the WEA that we are providing for the unemployed people. The project's objective is to implement local pilot and development ventures in five different localities, activating long-term unemployed people to develop themselves and to participate in activities which provide an alternative to regular salaried work.

The core idea of the project is to create processes which take into account the varied backgrounds and starting points of the participants and to help them progress from the ground up. During these processes different ways will emerge, leading to, for example, self development and adult learning, more or less permanent employment, volunteer work and also hobbies. The project aims to help participants break free of the cycle of marginalisation.

Guided Activity

The project offers its participants an opportunity to join in guided activity which offers them inspiration and opportunities for hobbies, learning and basically the ability to develop other activities that are an alternative to traditional salaried work.

For instance, within the third sector like working in co-operatives, voluntary organisations, volunteer work, achievements such as obtaining even occasional short-term employment or finding one's life task in helping others or dedicating one's time to a hobby and getting better at it are seen as a worthwhile outcome. Likewise a lot has been achieved if the self-esteem of the participants improves or they regain sense of meaning in their lives or gain new inter-relationships and find interesting things to intergrate into their everyday lives. In this way the activities also have a built-in therapeutic significance, but although these kinds of outcome are difficult to monitor breaking the cycle for marginalisation for even one individual can be worth hundreds and thousands of financial savings to society.

We should remember also that the long-term unemployed like other people also have families and by improving the lives of the participants we can also help to improve the lives of those close to them. Some of the lessons learnt in the project can be rightly applied to improve the situation of the families, for instance by improving the families' dietary and economical planning.

One of the ideas of the project is also to create a snowball effect through learning processes aimed at the participants acting as support persons, group leaders, or tutors for the next generation of participants.

The activities will be implemented in close cooporation with unemployed people's organisations, municipal authorities, local organisations and local third sector partners. From the prospective of the organisations and individuals organising these kind of activities or interested in doing so the creation of entirely new kinds of cooporation networks should also be seen as one of the significant benefits.

Communal Dimension

Within these projects the participants have the potential to develop and accumulate professional knowledge and skills applicable to the local conditions and useful in the future. It must be emphasized that the project is characterised by a communal dimension in adult education, where learning processes, preventive social work and various employment measures - for instance in the third sector - are interwoven into a unified whole.

Concerning the activities of the project, we can say that the project's educational perspective is rather wide. It has not been the aim to construct a single track to be followed by all participants, rather we want to advance by probing ahead and trying different kinds of alternative processes, both with respect to contents and methodology. We acknowledge the diversity of the participants' needs and backgrounds as our starting point. The project participants are offered many different possibilities for compiling a programme suitable to their individual needs.

The contents of the local projects include for instance the following topics, health and improving one's physical fitness, managing family finances, compiling a personal biography, general education subjects (languages, mathematics, computer skills, creative expression, philosophy), free-time activity groups, improving skills in finding employment, volunteer activities, gaining knowledge about learning opportunities, and now co-operative activities.

In terms of methodology the activities are largely based on small-group pedagogy (study circles); in addition, short courses and workshop-type activities are organised. The average learner in the project is a middle-aged long-term unemployed person whose prognosis for becoming employed is poor due to insufficient educational background and the 'wrong' type of work experience (industrial work); other target groups are unemployed young people and immigrants (from Russia, Ingermanland, Estonia).

The Alternative Activities Project represents a modernised form and content of workers' educational activities for the late 1990s. The long-term unemployed and immigrants are the 1990s equivalent of the masses of industrial workers who suffered from a lack of social and educational equality at the beginning of this century. In turn, the outlying neighborhoods where these modern-day proletariat live correspond to the workers' communities of old.

The Alternative Activities Project is part of the Finnish strategy for lifelong learning, where strengthening the intellectual resources of groups threatened by marginalization forms an especially important part of present-day equality politics.

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