Contextual aspects; drivers and brakes

The Municipality of Houten has identified a major mismatch in the labour market: for each vacancy for paid work, there were ten people looking for work. This mismatch was even greater among those at the ‘bottom’ of the labour market pyramid or with greatest distance from the labour market. Houten has a group of 140 inhabitants who have been dependent for a long time (at least 3 to 5 years) on social assistance. The total number of unemployed and social assistance recipients in Houten is more than 1200 persons.

The project had two phases: (1) research phase and (2) co-creation phase.

In the research phase potential participants have been approached by the network partners of the municipality. These partners are: the Houten Work Table (HWT); the ‘In Between Café’ (monthly event to inspire and inform job seekers); the Food bank; the Language House; the Social Support Team; the Power Plant (supports unemployed people); the regional Entrepreneurs Associations, the Department of Economic Affairs of the Municipality of Houten, Work and Income Lekstroom (WIL: provides welfare benefits to people who need it and guides them to work, paid or unpaid.); UWV (Social Insurance Organisation), etc. Also people have been approached that are close to the target groups and who have been able to collect stories from job seekers and potential employers (underlying problems, wishes and needs of job seekers and previous experiences of employers by engaging people with a distance to the labour market).

Thirty-one stories have been collected. A selection of the stories has been used at the Conversation of Change Event in which the components and priorities for the co-creation phase have been defined in the venue of the Power Plant. More than 40 people participated, including a number of persons from the target groups (job seekers and employers). Community reports have been used as an input for discussions in small groups. This has led to a large number of proposals for follow-up activities and experiments.

These stories have been analysed to identify the most important themes (basic needs such as home, food, children and finances come first; problems in the service system world; good and personal matches; support in the seek process for job seekers and employers).

• Basic needs: Twilight zone solution – with a kind of savings box (lifelong learning) to ensure that you will not get into trouble in the phase that you go from social assistance/unemployment benefit to salary; Mailboxes for anyone who does not have a formal postal address, for example at the railway station or in the theater; App “reminder” that informs you about needed actions when things change in your financial or work situation.
• The system world: Intermediaries close to the client, with decision latitude (autonomy) to prevent escalation of problems; selection tool that assesses the support you need (in an objective way); experiment with self-employed people with a meet-up with potential clients instead of the obligation to apply for jobs; language support for status holders (formal refugees) to help them to find (paid) work, to cope with regulations and to strengthen their self-efficacy.
• The good and personal match: “Open house” with companies: where companies and job seekers can meet each other in an open and personal way; more work experiments in companies, where support is facilitated
• Support for job seekers and employers around and after making the match: buddy at the workplace who supports the employee and employer (e.g. expectations, (work) culture, health needs/adjustments); public-private partnerships to support status holders (formal refugees) to find start-up jobs in the ICT sector.

In the later co-creation phase the involved stakeholders (including job seekers and potential employers) made further choices based on engagement and energy and selected four interventions for implementation.

1. Setting up an Information desk with native language support for Eritrean status holders
2. Getting hold on your twilight zone; finding solutions for obstructive factors people face during their re-integration trajectory
3. Feasibility study to find out if a block chain app can be used as an ‘alternative’ for a regular curriculum vitae
4. Transparent application; to personalise the job searching procedure.

Drivers

• Interest and Support from the municipality and other stakeholders. The ultimate goal of this project is to realize a ‘new narrative’, a movement in the municipality’s policy making that engages its citizens (returning the ‘human factor’): “Engaging our citizens needs to be a central part of our strategic agenda in the municipality of Houten.”
• Support from action researchers in dialogues, analysis and community reporter tool.

Brakes

• At the same time, many local policies are still ‘top down’ oriented. Realizing the above goals takes time: “The idea of co-creation is contrary to ‘forcing people to meet certain deadlines’. By putting the emphasis on deadlines you undermine the opportunity for an equal partnership with citizens.”
• Timing – the summer holiday period for example has slowed down the momentum for enthusiasm of the Conversation of Change Event.
• Continuity: when new representatives of stakeholders were included in the initiatives it also decreased the momentum.
• Administrative practices within the municipality also delayed the interventions. Although a budget for the interventions was available from the CoSIE project, the proposed interventions had to be approved within the municipal context. This took place at the time when the municipal budget had to be cut. This made it difficult to make decisions about these projects and led to delays.