EPYCO: MORE EMPLOYABILITY FOR BETTER REINTEGRATION

Luis González
Social Action and Decentralized Internacional Cooperation Director Action Against Hunger

“No-one knows what he can do until he tries�

Pubilius Syrus (85 a.c. – 43 a.c.)

 

Action Against Hunger is a humanitarian, international and independent organisation, created in 1979. Our vision is a world without malnutrition. Our main goal is to restore dignity to those who today live threatened with hunger.

In Spain, in 2012 we included among our central concepts of intervention that of employability, led by our experience, developing access programme to livelihoods in more than 45 countries. The mission of these programmes is to provide people with the resources necessary to be able to support themselves and be active agents of their own change, being able to do without external aid.

Our projects have as their aim for people to improve their employment situation in a stable and long-lasting way, since our commitment is to favour access to decent and quality employment.

We are mainly geared towards those groups which are more vulnerable to the market: long-term unemployed people, immigrants, women with family responsibilities, young people, those over 45 years of age, people who receive the Guaranteed Minimum Income and people serving a custodial sentence.

Today we are one of the beneficiary entities of the aid that the European Social Fund allocates to develop the Operational Programme of Social Inclusion and Social Economy 2014-2020. Our programmes are jointly financed by public administrations and the private sector.

One of our main joint financial backers is the National Entity of Prison Work and Training for Employment, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior through the Secretary General of Penitentiary Institutions. This Entity contributes to the constitutional mandate of the re-education and social reinsertion, facilitating professional training to people serving a custodial sentence, the possibility of holding a job position in a production workshop in prison, labour orientation and incorporation in the ordinary labour market through support programmes in the active search for employment.

In 2017 the National Entity of Prison Work and Training for Employment had as its aim to set in motion a framework programme of socio-labour insertion of its own, which would bring together the excellent practices of its socio-labour insertion programmes (SAL and Reincorpora, among others), in addition to, new focuses on group intervention with people seeking employment, all under a new paradigm of professional intervention, in high-performance teams.

In March 2017, within the framework of the Reincorpora Programme, with support from the Banking Foundation “la Caixa�, we carried out a pilot project in the Madrid III-Valdemoro Prison and in the Social Insertion Centre “Josefina Aldecoa� of Navalcarnero.

For this, a high-performance team was formed in each establishment, made up of prison professionals (psychologists, educator, social workers, training managers, work coordinators, etc.) and experts of the Reincorpora Programme, who for 7 months, accompanied by a Learning Coach from Action Against Hunger, dealt with content related to the competence-based approach, the coaching approach, socio-labour insertion and the cycle of programmes of social intervention. The result was the Socio-Labour Insertion Programme EPYCO, which takes into account key elements in order to achieve the objective of improving the employability of convicts, and to get and keep a medium and long-term job.

The EPYCO Programme commits to the improvement of the employability of people serving a custodial sentence, the access of these people to the job market through decent job offers, and their maintaining stable in the labour market.

The EPYCO Programme commits to the improvement of the employability of people serving a custodial sentence, the access of these people to the job market through decent job offers, and their maintaining stable in the labour market.

In order to introduce this new methodology in the majority of the territory, the Action Against Hunger Foundation, as an Intermediary Body of the European Social Fund within the framework of the Operative Programme of Social Inclusion and Social Economy 2014-2020, was part of the conference of the Key Concept 6 of Social Innovation being beneficiaries of the Operation “Plans in prison establishments� as resolved on 11 April 2017 by the Administrative Unit of the European Social Fund.

As a result of this resolution, this State Entity and the Action Against Hunger Foundation signed a collaboration agreement in October 2017, which defined the joint intervention strategy and the project scalability in the following territories: Andalusia, Valencia, Murcia, Madrid, Asturias and Corunna.

In the EPYCO Programme the people who are serving a custodial sentence are preselected from the moment of their imprisonment. It is the professionals from the prison setting who have taken part in high-performance teams, who make this preselection based on the need for improvement of employability. Following this, the team of the EPYCO Programme starts a job aimed at strengthening the commitment of the convicts with their future, working with personal values, and linking them to employment, preparing an action plan.

This initial task, with a coaching approach, looks to establish the bases of the individual change process, prior to the specific intervention of the Programme.

Once the candidates have drawn up their action plan, the employment experts of the Reincorpora Programme prepare the employability profile, from a double perspective: social (centred on the barriers and determinants for employment), and professional. In this process the basic and transversal competencies which have been chosen for the EPYCO programme are evaluated, through a methodology provided by the Accenture Foundation, developed in the framework of its initiative “Together for Employment� and through the agreement signed with Action Against Hunger.

When the candidate accesses the programme, the EPYCO prepares a highly valuable prison document (PITE) in which the actions are collected which will make sense of their plan, linking these actions to the rest of the commitments acquired for the serving of their sentence. That document, revisable every six months, allows the participant to access a catalogue of resources of the establishment, specially put together for the EPYCO Programme.

The catalogue of resources gathers the actions which are directed at the management of the action plan (with coaching approach), at the compensation of barriers and determinants for employment, at competence training in activities designed by the EPYCO team, at activities to the active job search, at the activities organised by the social entities. In order to make this catalogue possible, the Programme was extended to each prison establishment, collecting the support and collaboration of all the professionals from the prison setting responsible for the management of training, productive and occupational activities.

To draw up the catalogue the Prison Social Councils of all the establishments have also participated in, making the social entities aware of the EPYCO Programme, and recalling its participation in the coordination procedures and carrying out of actions for the Programme, as well as in the continuous evaluation procedure of competence improvement.

There are currently 33 high-performance teams in Spain, made up of more than 400 professionals from the Secretary General of Penitentiary Institutions and from the entities which execute the Reincorpora programme, setting in motion the EPYCO Programme in 33 prison establishments.

The ratio of labour insertions is between 70% and 75%, and the time taken for insertion to take place has reduced from 90 days to 52 days (data from June 2018).

The level of satisfaction of the participants is very high, particularly valuing the participation in a programme of socio-labour insertion led by the prison professionals, the personal impact made on them by interventions with a coaching approach, and the prepared and refreshed way in which they are attending job interviews.

Lastly, it is worth pointing out that thanks to this experience, the organisational mechanism of the prison establishments has improved, by introducing a methodology which considers all professionals included in the training and work development of convicts, defining the internal procedures of coordination, management and execution, as well as with the collaborative entities, and increasing the relationship between prisons and social insertion centres, through a model of continuity, begun in the ordinary regime prisons, which is kept until semi-freedom.