Gearing up for SUMMER JOB 2012

The Summer Job project brings together about one hundred young people from all around the Czech Republic to help citizens living in Manětín area. The main target is to encourage local people, especially the young ones, to take an active part in their area issues. By offering help on work projects that can improve the quality of life in the chosen place the project can set an example which can later be built upon. The area is a former Sudetenland where the current population has been brought to from all parts of the country. For not only this sole reason, the relationships are rather anonymous and social life quite stagnant.

The project enhances an active participation of young people living in this area on their area matters. The project itself lasts one week starting in the beginning of the summer holidays (July, 2-7). Young people willing to participate in this project may find detailed information and application form on the web pages http://summerjob.naplno.net. The project coordinators will ensure accommodation and catering, so that the participants’ costs are the lowest possible. The coordination team will offer help to the representatives of the local municipalities in the area and through them continuously to all households. Participants will be divided every day into smaller groups working on different projects either for local villages, or for chosen households. One of the aims is to encourage young people from the area to join the participants and work together on these projects. In order to build a team atmosphere and enforce the relationships which emerged during the day, there will be an everyday evening program prepared not only for the participants, but mainly for the local people, so they can come together, meet new people. In addition, they could find out more about the daily activities of the participants (or come with a work tasks that participants can assume).

One of the main goals is to bring up an open and inspiring dialog between people of different religion, age, or with various social and economic background. It is also expected (or rather wished for) that the local young people can build upon their summer experience and become to approach the social issues more active also during the year and a concept of civil society can be implemented also to this area.

2012 is going to be the third and the last year of the project in Manětín area. Since numerous relationships emerged during the last two years, organization team decided to declare 2012 as the last one in this area, so that the local people are encouraged to overtake the idea of the project themselves. The three year cycle seems to be accurate to maintain the goal and from 2013 the project will be shifted to another area with need of social life encouragement.