System approach to close the employment gap and create a more inclusive labor market for vulnerable groups

SYNCLUSIVE is an innovative, integral, and interdisciplinary systems’ approach to stimulate inclusion of vulnerable groups in the labor market.

To achieve this, our six central objectives are: 1) developing and consolidating a coalition of stakeholders in 4 regional Living Labs across Europe along the lines of the Community Coalition Action Theory, using the ENGINE approach.

This approach includes an integrated package of interventions that stimulates upward and sideward mobility of vulnerable employees, hereby creating vacancies for inflow of vulnerable job seekers; 2) testing the usefulness and applicability of the ENGINE approach for different vulnerable groups identified as being discriminated against; 3) identifying drivers and barriers for mobility and inflow including discrimination; 4) assessing the impact of the implemented ENGINE approach on the labor market mobility and inclusion of vulnerable groups; 5) identifying transition pathways from the regional to the national and EU policy level; and 6) identifying interoperable and comparative indicators and standards that are relevant for the labor market inclusion of vulnerable groups taking into account the regional, national (legislative, social security) and cultural context.

Regional stakeholder commitment as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for the success of SYNCLUSIVE and for inclusion of vulnerable people in the labor market.

SYNCLUSIVE therefore collaborates in an ‘active community coalition’ amongst municipalities, employers, civil society and educational institutes, which interacts with their political counterparts at national and EU level across 7 European regions.

SYNCLUSIVE results will lead to sustainable inclusion of vulnerable groups in the regional Living Labs, and have vast potential to result in outcomes far beyond the scope and duration of the project.

SYNCLUSIVE will contribute to generic and context-specific EU-wide policy and intervention recommendations that drive inclusion of vulnerable groups and help to start overcoming discrimination in the EU labour market.