Speakers - Ashoka

Employment through Empowerment Cluster leader: Norbert Kunz. Cluster language: English
How can we enable people excluded from the labor market to live up to their full productive potential?
In 2010, unemployment in the Euro zone hit 10 percent. One in three Europeans of working age has few or no formal
qualifi cations, making them 40 percent less likely to be employed than those with medium-level qualifi cations, according
to fi gures compiled by an expert group. While economic centers come off comparatively well, many rural areas run
danger of falling completely behind and becoming unable to offer any economic opportunities to their inhabitants, at all.
Rather than trying to compose a complex analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of specifi c labor markets, or taking
up common debates on the defi cits and personal burdens unemployed must overcome in order to become employable,
this cluster will focus on innovative solutions that empower people of all ages and backgrounds to live up to their full
productive potential.
To date, people out of work are regarded as people with certain defi cits who will fi nd work only when they learn specifi c
skills and get engaged. This archaic point of view explains the low success rates of many traditional integration models
on the market. In many regions, these models are doomed to fail anyways as there are simply no jobs where people can
be placed.
Leading social entrepreneurs understand how to leverage and employ so far unused potential. Instead of applying standardized
“one size fi ts all” methods to all their “clients”, they enable people to be part of their own individual solutions.
In this cluster, outstanding Ashoka Fellows whose work aims to give people outside the labor market an active role
as co-producers of their solutions explore ways to expand their solutions, learn from each other, integrate their key
success factors in employment policies across Europe – and together with experts from policy and economy realms -
discuss how they can extend the social paradigm from training defi cient non-workers to empowering them.
CLUSTER PARTICIPANTS:
Fellows include: Christine Theodoloz-Walker, Maurice Lim Miller, Raúl Contreras, Elliot Brown, Franz Dullinger, Jose Maria
Perez Gonzales, Sofi a Appelgren etc.
For a new housing value chain Cluster leader: François Marty. Cluster language: French
Housing is at the crossroads of many issues: environmental with the question of home energy effi ciency, economic
particularly in the context of scarce raw materials, demographic with housing options increasingly inappropriate for the
population they address, but also health and social cohesion, both strongly linked to housing.
However, current models have reached their limits in their capacity to design and build housing successfully and to
involve inhabitants to become active homeowners.
Recently, many initiatives have been undertaken to tackle these barriers by social entrepreneurs, experts, private companies,
and public authorities, some of whom have joined this cluster.
This working session aims at developing a new vision of the housing value chain and identifying the obstacles to overcome
the barriers, in order to allow innovations and new practices to scale up through all possible partnerships.
CLUSTER PARTICIPANTS:
Fellows include: Stuart Cohen, Rosanne Haggerty, Tomasz Sadowski, Raul Robert, Arnaud Castagnède, etc.
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