By next year, the EU will have pumped over £100 million into area-based employment and education partnership initiatives in many centres around the State. The aim of these initiatives is to reduce long-term unemployment, support business initiatives and generally improve the lot of marginalised communities. Increasingly, many of these local initiatives are using education-based programmes to achieve results.
And this trend is set to develop even further. "The potential in education has not been fully tapped into yet," says David Brennan, company secretary of Area Development Management, the independent company which manages this EU money on behalf of the Government.
Available figures on the partnership initiatives show that they are already bearing fruit. Up to the end of 1997, about 7,000 people have started their own business through the partnerships - and up to 80 per cent of these had been long-term unemployed. In addition, 8,000 people have been placed in full-time employment - half of them were long-term unemployed.
A further 2,000 people have got part-time employment and over 15,000 from disadvantaged backgrounds have taken part in partnership-funded education initiatives. About half are adults on low incomes who were assisted in participating in third-level education.
ADM also estimates that 11,000 children from disadvantaged backgrounds took part in partnership projects aimed at preventing educational under-achievement. The company also estimates that over 10,000 people have been placed by partnerships in FAS, CERT or other vocational training programmes.
It was reported in this newspaper last December that for the first time the number of long-term unemployment "fell significantly" in the year ending April 1997. At local level, these area-based initiatives comprise 38 "partnerships" in designated disadvantaged areas, 33 community groups in non-disadvantaged areas and selected organisations. Often working in the background, they pull people together from all sorts of sectors and provide a forum to tackle problems in an integrated way.
"Because the education co-ordinators were appointed only in July/August last year, we're expecting to see a fairly sharp jump in involvement in education shortly," says Brennan.
There is no formal link between the partnerships and the Department of Education and Science at present, but the Minister, Micheal Martin, sees great scope for the partnerships in the area of education in the future and will shortly make an announcement about the expansion of the initiative. In the past, communities, schools and local groups were involved in various enterprises on an ad hoc basis, but the partnerships claim they can pull a disparate range of resources together and allow things to "happen in a much more holistic way", as one participant explains.
For example, certain partnerships, through their involvement, initial funding, assistance to disadvantaged students and education programmes have helped to increase the number of young people who go on to third-level education.
Each partnership company has a local office with its own manager. It is made up of the social partners in the area - business, trade unions, farming organisations, schools, health boards, state agencies such as FAS and representatives from the local communities.
An independent study of these partnerships was made by Professor Charles Sabel, of the Columbia Law School in New York, with a team from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). "One of the main strengths of the partnership programme is its experimental nature," Sabel noted. There was in setting it up "an implicit confidence in the capability and imagination of local people.
"They permit a range of local actors to pool resources and address local problems in a way that the central government agencies cannot. The role of the partnerships is to complement the activities of government agencies not to compete with them."
Neal Newman, manager of Southside Partnership which caters for communities in the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown area of Co Dublin, says that in order to help "the most disadvantaged people" the partnership has to be ready to do some tough talking.
"We have to be comfortable with rocking the boat," he says. "You have to remember that we're doing something that has never been done in this country before and that local government in general does become very sectorial. They tend not to work with others. We have been brought in to tell them to make it work with a local focus - it can be chaotic."
Newman says that there is much complacency among agencies. "They've been doing their work on their own for so long." To get some state bodes to work on a local level in certain disadvantaged areas is "near impossible".
Brennan says: "We're at an early stage in breaking down the barriers." According to a report by ADM, which oversees the operation of the partnerships, achievements under the various initiatives to date "far exceed expectations".
Kathy Bradley, education co-ordinator with the Southside Partnership, says that "all are invited to the table" - social workers, health board representatives, therapists in speech and language, gardai, youth workers, State agencies, teachers, parents and those involved in community work. "It's a bottoms-up approach," she says, "which makes our work much harder.
"We try and work in partnership with the State agencies and the voluntary sector and not to hold the gun to their heads. You have to shame them a bit but it's not all-out war. We don't make enemies."
The partnerships are "about having resources and enabling something to happen in a much more holistic way", says Bradley. "You're providing communities with the where with all to make them equal. It's coming together from a much broader perspective - working in isolation is not the same. They can be frustrated and isolated and not having the resources to tackle it but once you bring people to the table you draw the resources together."
David Brennan believes that, in terms of getting best value from public money, the more you listen to people on the ground the better the spread will be. "As an effective way of targeting public money towards where the shoe hurts, it's a very good process," he says. "The local community can influence decision-making in a meaningful way. It gives them a real say as to where money is spent in their locality."
Newman says: "There's a specific focus on the poorest of the poor. It's a long-term change, it's chipping away. We're forcing State agencies to work differently - it makes our job more difficult because we have to use moral pressure and to show why change would work better. Underneath there's a lot of very, very creative and life-changing work going on."
