Unemployment is always a great matter of personal stability and social integration. Having a job, a career, if possible, is important not only in earning as living but, deeper in playing a social role, being a part of the social, economic and cultural canvas.
We usually access the problem of unemployment from the point of view of organized offering of job opportunities to those concerned, an external, so to speak, only partly controlled by them process.
If the focus is turned to the side of the unemployed themselves, as personalities with a hidden dynamic, we may discover unexplored fields of opportunity.
This was, actually, the point of view of the participants in a recent meeting in Mantova, Italy, during the first week of March, held in the framework of the Erasmus project “Recyclart”**, in which persons sent by the organizations, who are partners in the project, explored pathways to confronting unemployment, particularly in the field of circular economy, namely reusing and recycling with the ambition of finally creating pieces of art and paying back to the environment as well.
The idea of focus in the meeting was the reinvention of oneself, as a way of exploring new fields of possible employment, especially creative ones. The support to an unemployed person is as more effective as it encourages him to think deeply in himself, his personal story, successes and failures, preferences, creativity, hidden abilities of cooperating with other unemployed people and understanding the momentum of our era, a momentum that is determined by the concept of circular economy.
If this process is directed preferably into results with an artistic touch, the satisfaction of work, the advanced unfolding of capabilities and competences is expected to be more effective for the unemployed both in the short-term perspective and the long term one.
Georgios Kanellis: Legal representative of Ecological Movement of Patras, a partner in the Recyclart Erasmus project.
**https://www.recyclartproject.eu/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/211065787543203