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Valuing diversity: guidance for labour market integration of migrants
simultaneously networks with the communities to identify potential candidates for
its programme and with NGOs to identify potential host organisations for
internship and employment.
5.1.3.2. Stakeholder organisations and community involvement
Most project promoters are either public services or non-profit organisations; in
the latter case, there is cooperation between the promoters and public
administrations to aid client processes. Most projects are jointly financed by
public authorities and European funds.
Non-profit organisations usually have regional scope and cooperate with
local actors, such as local employers’ associations, local/regional administrations,
training centres, universities, research centres and other service providers. Direct
involvement with immigrant communities or community representatives is more
common when the promoter is a non-profit or private organisation (as with
Prospects services in the United Kingdom, Nostos association in Greece, AMIC
in Spain).
In some cases immigrant communities may be directly involved in provision
of public services as with the Portuguese insertion offices. However, involvement
is usually generated indirectly, through financing NGO projects or
hiring/collaboration of professionals with immigrant background, as in the
validation centres in Berlin and Malmo or in the Estonian adaptation programme.
Public promoters can have both regional and national scope, often
connected to the administrative and political framework of the country. Although
the sample of cases presented in this report is limited, it is possible to suggest a
few tendencies: in Italy, Spain and Germany we tend to find regional initiatives on
behalf of public authorities; we frequently find municipal initiatives in France and
Sweden; in other countries, central initiatives seem to be more common, as in
Estonia, Greece, Latvia and Portugal.
While integration practices developed by non-profit organisations can take
any form, public initiatives tend to follow general government initiatives or make
use of their established support mechanisms. The Latvian case extends general
active employment measures to the immigrant population, thus providing
guidance for this group; the French CED uses existing contractual mechanisms
to support career transitions in youth and inserts them in a structured programme
and support network for groups at risk of exclusion.
Most non-profit projects are project-based, while public initiatives are
frequently part of, or can originate, permanent systems. Public authorities tend to
insert their interventions in the logic of general support systems with regular
budgets and use European financing as a complement; non-profit organisations
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