rEUsilience – Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families 

COFACE is partner in this 3-year (2022-2025) Horizon Europe research project together with the universities of Oxford, Stockholm, Barcelona, Warsaw, KULeuven and Zagreb. The problem that rEUsilience tackles is of lack of adaptive capacities or resilience (understood from a familial rather than individual perspective) and resulting dilemmas and inequalities. The context is one of fast-paced changes in labour markets and income security to which families have to act as key responsive entities, cushioning potentially negative impacts and enabling/disabling risk-taking and change. In focusing especially on families that may not be able to respond and understanding the conditions that make for familial resilience more generally, the project answers 2 research questions: What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome these? How do social policies contribute to familial resilience especially in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive, flexible and complementary?  Taken as a whole, the project’s research will identify the level of risk and socio-economic insecurity faced by families across Europe and the relative capacity of different family types to absorb socio-economic shocks by adjusting behaviours and structural arrangements and it will critically examine the role of policy as a contributory factor to related processes and outcomes.

Check out the project website https://reusilience.eu/ and sign up here to receive rEUsilience updates.

Paths2Include.

European labour markets under pressure – new knowledge to include persons in vulnerable situations 

COFACE is partner in this 3-year (2023-2026) Horizon Europe research project together with Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway), University of Luxembourg, University of Bucharest (Romania), PIN S.c.r.l. / ARCO Action Research for Co-Development (Italy), University of Girona (Spain), Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), and the Institute for Structural Research (Poland).

The research project aims to provide new comparative knowledge on effective context-based policies to foster labour market inclusion and generate concepts of best practices to inform policies that promote inclusion and upwards convergence in employment and decent work for persons in vulnerable situations to overcome discrimination.  The role of COFACE Families Europe will focus specifically on implementing the project in close collaboration with stakeholders to develop and disseminate policy recommendations. We hope this research will be useful for different practitioners including employers, trade unions, policy-makers at national and EU level, EU agencies like Eurofound and the European Labour Authority as well as civil society organisations working on employment policies, anti-discrimination, gender equality at EU and national level.

Check out the project website https://paths2include.eu/ and sign up here to receive Paths2Include updates.

Erasmus+ project to build an online hub with tools to support parents and professionals

Erasmus+ project to build an online platform with parental

“Parenting can be hard and there is no universal method, family management is not something that is taught in formal education.”

With the rise of new technologies, the relationship between parents & children and the way they communicate has changed. The Skills4Parents partnership, led by COFACE Families Europe, has developed different resources to support parents & professionals to address the impact of these changes. The six partner organisations across 5 countries (Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy and The Netherlands) started working together in November 2020, and ended the project on in October 2022. They developed a Skills4Parents Learning Guide, and Handbook for Professionals and an online Hub, targeting both parents and professionals with learning material to help boost parental and child well-being.

COFACE is a partner in this research which has developed significant knowledge about how children and young people use and are affected by the technological transformations in their everyday lives. It started in December 2019 and ran through to November 2022. The project uncovered both harmful and beneficial effects of technology in the everyday lives of children and young people. This includes a focus on the family, educational institutions, leisure time and children and young people’s civic participation. DigiGen has provided new knowledge about the barriers and opportunities that children from a variety of backgrounds experience in relation to technology.  The project combines various research methods to develop new robust participatory methodologies for including children and young people as co-researchers, co-creators and co-designers. The diverse and innovative data collection methods include a mixed-methods study design and methodological triangulation, multisite and comparative ethnographic studies, multimodal approach, interviews and diaries. The interdisciplinary research team for this Horizon 2020 project comes from nine European countries.

CAPABLE – Enhancing Capabilities?

Rethinking Work-life Policies and their Impact from a New Perspective

COFACE is on the advisory board of this European Research Council research project ‘Enhancing Capabilities? Rethinking Work-life Policies and their Impact from a New Perspective’ (CAPABLE) is a large cross-national study on work-life policies and their impact on men and women from a capability perspective. The project started in December 2018 and continues through November 2023. Europe has witnessed significant work-life policy advancements designed to help men and women more equally combine employment with other spheres of life in recent decades, yet gender inequality persists. Improving gender equality in work-life balance is therefore high on policy agendas throughout Europe. Decades of research in this area have produced key insights but work-family theories fail to sufficiently explain the tenacity of this inequality. Earlier applications of a capabilities approach to work-life balance offer promising inroads, yet the importance of community remains absent. The CAPABLE project will generate fundamentally new knowledge on how work-life balance policies impact an individual’s capability to achieve this balance in Europe by incorporating the understudied dimension of community.

EuSocialCit

Horizon 2020 research on the state and future of social rights and European social citizenship.

COFACE is advisory board member of EuSocialCit, which studies ‘the state of social rights’ in Europe and the role of the EU in the future development of social rights. But what exactly are social rights? What is ‘Social Europe’? And what does the European Pillar of Social Rights do? It focuses on three domains that mirror the building blocks of the European Pillar of Social Rights (the empowerment of citizens, fair working conditions and social inclusion) and pursues five objectives: 

1. Bring together long-standing rival approaches to European social citizenship, and develop a resource-based, multilevel concept of social rights (recognizing that the resources supporting social rights can be located at EU, national and local levels).
2. Understand the current state of social rights and their relationship to outcomes (social and gender inequality, poverty  and precariousness).
3. Diagnose the shortcomings of the institutions that generate undesirable outcomes.
4. Understand attitudes, preferences and the demand for change among citizens, and the constraints and opportunities these create for the EU social agenda.
5. Develop alternative policy scenarios to strengthen European social rights, in particular to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights.

Euroship – closing gaps in social citizenship

COFACE is advisory board member of this Horizon 2020 research project, which aims to provide an original and gender-sensitive assessment of the current gaps in social protection across Europe.  Through the involvement of national and European stakeholders, Euroship aims to develop policy recommendations on how to strengthen social citizenship at the national and EU level. Euroship will provide new knowledge about the effectiveness of social protection policies targeted at reducing poverty and social exclusion in Europe. Focal points will be the roles of social protection systems (including minimum income schemes), digitalisation of work and social protection delivery, and  the political opportunities for exercising choice and influence by three groups of citizens:  youth at risk, precarious workers with care obligations and elderly and disabled people with long-term care needs.