June 3rd, 2019

     Currently, I work at the Exit Foundation. We work with young people at risk of social exclusion, like cases of academic failure, young migrants who are alone in the country or families in complicated socio-economic situations who depend on social services. Our aim is to work with external companies that participate actively in this process of insertion, building a bridge between the social and the business world, something that was difficult to find years ago.

In all of our projects, our involvement always depends on the context in which the young person finds themselves, especially on their situation within the educational system.

For example, we work a lot with kids who have not finished their compulsory education and therefore do not have a secondary school diploma. Their situation, in such case, is very limited by a context that determines access to one or other opportunity according to your degree of academic formation, and in the case of those who don’t have a secondary school diploma, there are many restrictions. In fact, nowadays their academic journey is cut off. In one of our projects, we offer a one-year course for young people in this situation.

It is a very practical course that focuses on a trade associated to a company while also working on other basic skills and that eventually allows access to an intermediate training degree in order to continue studying.

We have another programme that also works with young people who have already done this course and accessed an intermediate degree. There, they usually find that they come from a more practical education and they suddenly have to face theoretical education, books and exams again. Once more, the educational system sets the guidelines and rhythm for education, and if kids don’t adapt, they fall out of this system again. In this programme we offer curricular internships in companies and tasks linked to their degree to motivate learning and make it more experiential. Once this learning is complete, often the difficulty is not so much getting them hired so they can put their knowledge into practice but accessing the labour market itself. What we try to do in Exit Foundation is help them build a network

that allows them to access hidden job offers, which are found thanks to word of mouth and to which the young people with whom we work have difficult access.

What I would like now is for the kids who have gone through the Foundation to join it as “students” in order to keep this network alive, to make it grow, to serve as a reference, to create a social richness which these young people can rely on; an integrating community that facilitates empowerment, maturity and the possibility of sharing experiences.