The PAD project was presented in Sweden

This is a short summary of the possibility when the PAD project got to present ourselves in the Central Baltic Annual Event 2016 in Upplands Väsby in April. It was interesting to meet other project partners within Interreg Central Baltic and to get to know about many different projects going on in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, in Sweden and Finland.  The lead partner in the PAD project is Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki, Finland and our project partner is Tallinn University in Estonia. For me (Rut) it felt also very important to get the chance to present our PAD project to a bigger audience. This is a summery from what I was presenting about the PAD project at the Annual Event.

PAD stands for Positive Attitude Development and our target group is youth who have mental health problems or social problems. We want to develop the social interaction in the society for our target group and increase their job opportunities. We want to increase social inclusion in the society, communities and working life for the target group.Our aim is to promote youth employability and access to labour market by decreasing social exclusion and stigma.

Through various activities we are trying to change public attitudes towards young adults who are unemployed or who haven’t got any study place. The activities within the PAD-project are meant to open up for social interaction in the society, communities and working life for the target group. The activities are mainly “Face-to-face” meetings – Market meetings with citizens, employers and employees. We arrange training activities with the target group and professionals. We also aim to get a more visible Media campaign – TV, Radio, Facebook, Blog etc. The purpose of the activities is to develop the target group’s skills in interacting with their social environment. The different activities are held together with the project team where we have two very talented experience- or expert speakers, youngsters from our target group and of course our lecturers and students. Students from Social Services, Occupation Therapy and Nursing at Arcada, department of Health and Welfare are involved in the project by for example attending the events and writing their theses within this topic.

You can get to know more about the PAD project from our blog, our facebook page, our Project homepage, on the Interreg Central Baltic page and from the Arcada UAS home page.

Please follow our blog and our Facebook page! That way you get more information about our events and things you might be interested in. We also appreciate if you go in and like our Facebook page.

//Rut Nordlund-Spiby, Senior Lecturer in Social Services