The Polis Project
POLIS: Podpora sociálně - integračních politik a služeb
The Polis Project
The Polis Project >>> Beneficiaries
The primary target group of the POLIS Project are people in danger of social exclusion. The POLIS Project provides them with the services of field social workers. The social workers work together with clients to find out the reasons of his or her downward social mobility. Then, together they proceed to determine the steps needed for a continual improvement of the situation.
The fact that each set of problems typically faced by a socially excluded person has to be solved with different institutions is of central importance. The socially excluded are often incapable of appropriate communication with various Municipal Departments (for social issues, for housing etc.), Labour Office (LO), schools, employers, police, private flat owners and the like, which keeps them from solving their problems successfully. However, it is often the clerks that fail to assess client’s situation adequately, since they are not familiar with his or her actual living conditions, skills and capabilities.
Clerks, educators, teachers, pedagogues, police officers, elected representatives, and likewise MPs, senators, employers, journalists etc. are target groups of the POLIS Project as well. The POLIS staff is able to supply them with information on living conditions and prevalent problems of socially excluded people specific for a city or town. The POLIS educators prepare and implement thematically focused courses, workshops and educative activities for employees of the above mentioned institutions and subjects. They keep in touch with them on a regular basis. Henceforth, the staff of the various institutions can be given information collected by the social workers. Reciprocally, social workers can better inform their clients and prepare them for negotiations with authorities.
Public administration personnel is especially crucial in this respect, since they can influence the socially excluded people’s situation using a whole array of channels and tools:
Likewise the LO officers are to be educated and provided with information in the course of the project. Typically, they are not in a position to assess the individual skills and capacities of their clients since they don’t have enough time to build a closer relationship with them. Intercultural communication barriers are also in operation. To overcome this obstacle, the POLIS Project links the officers, field social workers and employers so that they can share information on individual clients (which a fieldworker usually disposes of) and eventually get them employed. Social workers motivate clients to cooperate tightly with Labour Offices, to be active in retraining programs and actively seek a job. At the same time, they negotiate with potential employers, recommend particular clients and prepare the recruited ones for entrance into a new workplace, often after very long period of time. Finally, they help the LO to readjust their retraining schemes so that they meet the actual needs and capabilities of the clients. Simultaneously, the project staff develops the techniques of subsequent care for people who have participated in the retraining schemes and are now employed in order for them to hold down a job and continue to improve themselves.
Proper education catering to the specific needs of children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds can be the best path towards their inclusion into the wider society. This assumption and the unpreparedness of most Czech schools to comply with the task is a good reason to focus on primary and secondary schools’ managers, pedagogues, and teachers as well. The project aims to change the pattern by which the pupils from socially excluded, specifically Romani families are overrepresented in the ‘special basic schools’ intended for mentally retarded children. (This is also due to the inability of some of the diagnostic tools to differentiate exactly between organic mental defects and social handicaps.) The project also helps to increase the number of such children continuing education in secondary schools.
Some of the causes why ‘normal’ basic schools are non-responsive to the needs of socially excluded children are largely technical and cannot be addressed by the project – the classes are overcrowded, teacher assistance is lacking; yet the others are rather curriculum-related. The POLIS Project, in cooperation with school personnel, is to implement intercultural and inclusive components into the School Educational Programs (SEPs), which both primary and secondary schools are bound to develop, hence the Czech government’s curriculum reform is in force. The SEPs must follow certain broad rules set by Framework Educational Programs designated on a national level. One of them is to include Multicultural Education as a horizontal topic in the curriculum. FEPs define the compulsory content, scope and conditions of education, but beyond these limits, the schools are free to adjust the content of education that they provide to their pupils. Currently, the need to create SEPs is perceived as a derangement by many schools; however, the POLIS Project finds it a perfect opportunity to reorganise the education accordingly to the requirements of socially handicapped children. For this end, the project cooperates with six basic schools, two grammar schools and three vocational apprentice centres, all of them located close to socially excluded ghettos.
The project staff also coordinates and prepares supplementary tutorage at children’s homes, which is to get the parents involved in their offspring’s education as well as various leisure activities.
Ghettos are characterised by a low level of legal control and normalisation of delinquency. In order to alter this, police officers are provided detailed information on socially excluded localities where the project’s field social workers operate. These are collected both by the social workers and anthropologists working for the project. Besides data on offences already committed, they also report on particular pathologies potentially leading to criminal activities as well as their social background. Thus, the officers are enabled to foresee problems and act on behalf of those endangered by typical ghetto criminality – usury, prostitution, drug-dealing, trafficking of people, domestic violence, sexual abuse and the like. The project’s educators transmit the information and teach the police officers basic intercultural skills in intensive workshops, implemented in our cooperation with the Czech police within the framework of the National Strategy on Policing Minorities.
More than 250,000 immigrants living in the Czech Republic face a broad range of problems in their attempts to integrate, find legal and reasonably paid work and decent housing. Currently, foreigners make up more than 3% of the labour force and their proportion is expected to rise with the continuing growth of the national economy and the softening of immigrant legislature. The number of illegally employed foreigners in the Czech Republic is increaing as well, but this is difficult to estimate. The nature of the predicament depends on the legal status and length of their residence, the language barrier, their cultural origin, their education level etc. The POLIS Project contributes indirectly to improvement of their situation on a few fields as it:
Finally, the project pays attention to journalists and their significant role in shaping public opinion about the socially excluded, the Roma and foreigners. The project intends to change stereotypes and will do so by having the media support staff continually informing journalists of the project’s blueprints and activities.
The fact that each set of problems typically faced by a socially excluded person has to be solved with different institutions is of central importance. The socially excluded are often incapable of appropriate communication with various Municipal Departments (for social issues, for housing etc.), Labour Office (LO), schools, employers, police, private flat owners and the like, which keeps them from solving their problems successfully. However, it is often the clerks that fail to assess client’s situation adequately, since they are not familiar with his or her actual living conditions, skills and capabilities.
Clerks, educators, teachers, pedagogues, police officers, elected representatives, and likewise MPs, senators, employers, journalists etc. are target groups of the POLIS Project as well. The POLIS staff is able to supply them with information on living conditions and prevalent problems of socially excluded people specific for a city or town. The POLIS educators prepare and implement thematically focused courses, workshops and educative activities for employees of the above mentioned institutions and subjects. They keep in touch with them on a regular basis. Henceforth, the staff of the various institutions can be given information collected by the social workers. Reciprocally, social workers can better inform their clients and prepare them for negotiations with authorities.
Public administration personnel is especially crucial in this respect, since they can influence the socially excluded people’s situation using a whole array of channels and tools:
- welfare system set-up (motivating socially excluded people to get employed vs. granting them inelastic, unmotivating benefits)
- a focus on organised crime repression (esp. usury, prostitution, drug dealing and the like, all endangering socially deprived in the first place)
- support of diverse types of substitute care, mainly substitute familial care as an alternative to expensive institutional care for non-adults
- state and municipal housing policies (which can contribute to the formation of ghettos out of public control, with overpriced rents and indebted occupants; or conversely, they can embody transparent management and assignment of municipally owned apartments and the establishment of both social housing for socially deprived and low-income groups and of asylums for people in momentary crisis)
- differentiation of the provided social assistance services, since these can stabilise a person in intermediary crisis and help her or him return to normal functioning as soon as possible
- support of community planning and networking of social services and institutions
- education of clerks in order for them to understand life in social exclusion
- increase the number of clients per clerks, since officers are typically overloaded in the current system.
Likewise the LO officers are to be educated and provided with information in the course of the project. Typically, they are not in a position to assess the individual skills and capacities of their clients since they don’t have enough time to build a closer relationship with them. Intercultural communication barriers are also in operation. To overcome this obstacle, the POLIS Project links the officers, field social workers and employers so that they can share information on individual clients (which a fieldworker usually disposes of) and eventually get them employed. Social workers motivate clients to cooperate tightly with Labour Offices, to be active in retraining programs and actively seek a job. At the same time, they negotiate with potential employers, recommend particular clients and prepare the recruited ones for entrance into a new workplace, often after very long period of time. Finally, they help the LO to readjust their retraining schemes so that they meet the actual needs and capabilities of the clients. Simultaneously, the project staff develops the techniques of subsequent care for people who have participated in the retraining schemes and are now employed in order for them to hold down a job and continue to improve themselves.
Proper education catering to the specific needs of children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds can be the best path towards their inclusion into the wider society. This assumption and the unpreparedness of most Czech schools to comply with the task is a good reason to focus on primary and secondary schools’ managers, pedagogues, and teachers as well. The project aims to change the pattern by which the pupils from socially excluded, specifically Romani families are overrepresented in the ‘special basic schools’ intended for mentally retarded children. (This is also due to the inability of some of the diagnostic tools to differentiate exactly between organic mental defects and social handicaps.) The project also helps to increase the number of such children continuing education in secondary schools.
Some of the causes why ‘normal’ basic schools are non-responsive to the needs of socially excluded children are largely technical and cannot be addressed by the project – the classes are overcrowded, teacher assistance is lacking; yet the others are rather curriculum-related. The POLIS Project, in cooperation with school personnel, is to implement intercultural and inclusive components into the School Educational Programs (SEPs), which both primary and secondary schools are bound to develop, hence the Czech government’s curriculum reform is in force. The SEPs must follow certain broad rules set by Framework Educational Programs designated on a national level. One of them is to include Multicultural Education as a horizontal topic in the curriculum. FEPs define the compulsory content, scope and conditions of education, but beyond these limits, the schools are free to adjust the content of education that they provide to their pupils. Currently, the need to create SEPs is perceived as a derangement by many schools; however, the POLIS Project finds it a perfect opportunity to reorganise the education accordingly to the requirements of socially handicapped children. For this end, the project cooperates with six basic schools, two grammar schools and three vocational apprentice centres, all of them located close to socially excluded ghettos.
The project staff also coordinates and prepares supplementary tutorage at children’s homes, which is to get the parents involved in their offspring’s education as well as various leisure activities.
Ghettos are characterised by a low level of legal control and normalisation of delinquency. In order to alter this, police officers are provided detailed information on socially excluded localities where the project’s field social workers operate. These are collected both by the social workers and anthropologists working for the project. Besides data on offences already committed, they also report on particular pathologies potentially leading to criminal activities as well as their social background. Thus, the officers are enabled to foresee problems and act on behalf of those endangered by typical ghetto criminality – usury, prostitution, drug-dealing, trafficking of people, domestic violence, sexual abuse and the like. The project’s educators transmit the information and teach the police officers basic intercultural skills in intensive workshops, implemented in our cooperation with the Czech police within the framework of the National Strategy on Policing Minorities.
More than 250,000 immigrants living in the Czech Republic face a broad range of problems in their attempts to integrate, find legal and reasonably paid work and decent housing. Currently, foreigners make up more than 3% of the labour force and their proportion is expected to rise with the continuing growth of the national economy and the softening of immigrant legislature. The number of illegally employed foreigners in the Czech Republic is increaing as well, but this is difficult to estimate. The nature of the predicament depends on the legal status and length of their residence, the language barrier, their cultural origin, their education level etc. The POLIS Project contributes indirectly to improvement of their situation on a few fields as it:
- assists the schools in incorporating Multicultural Education and generally inclusive features into their curriculum;
- supports non-discriminatory municipal measures and policies in the labour market;
- supports the employing of foreigners;
- raises public awareness about their situation and problems.
Finally, the project pays attention to journalists and their significant role in shaping public opinion about the socially excluded, the Roma and foreigners. The project intends to change stereotypes and will do so by having the media support staff continually informing journalists of the project’s blueprints and activities.
