Jan 25, 2014
Changing the educational system to social exchange
For the 2013 Transeuropa Festival in Warsaw, we held a one-week long workshop on precarity and unemployment.
It started with establishing main questions:
- what is your dream job?
- what are your qualifications, education and professional experience?
- what do the young unemployed, if they don’t have a job?
- how can we encourage young people to start their own business?
- howe can we provide young people with skill useful in professional life?
As a result of the discussion four main fields of activities were defined
- development of courses at universities focusing on practical skills, such as constructing business plans and management
- regular consultations in city offices and simplification of procedures related to starting one’s business
- sustained collaboration between employers and universities enabling to meet the current needs of the market
- creating co-working more spaces, where young people can examine their business ideas and present them to eventual business partners.
The event held at the end of workshop involved also an example of social exchange system: wymiennik.org based on barter. It has over 3500 offers and nearly 2000 members.
One of them, Beata participated in Warsaw meeting explained how it works. Her activity on wymiennik concerns cooking skills, she organizes “cuisine reunions”, during which she teaches how to bake
traditional polish cakes or make preserve products from seasonal fruits.
Her role is to provide knowledge and space, but the participants are responsible for supplies: fruits, vegetables, sugar, flour, jars, etc. Those meeting has a multilevel impact. They allow people to be more creative in the kitchen and better plan the expenses, but it is also an opportunity, during time spent on making the products, to exchange different skills among each other.
By Natali Szelachowska