Project van de Week: arbeidsmarktbemiddeling voor slechthorenden in Litouwen (en)
'Towards Work - development of mediation services in recruiting people with hearing disabilities’- is a social video project. This three-year project, which benefited from EUR 891 100 EU-funding, was launched in March 2009 by the Republican Rehabilitation Centre of the Deaf in Lithuania.
The videos target the hearing society, in particular employers, to encourage them to discover the value of deaf people and their employment potential. Their key message is that deaf
people live among us and are just like us. All we need is to pay a little more attention to communicate and work together.
During the project, specially trained recruitment agents or ‘employment mediators’ working in a series of pilot job centres helped hearing-impaired people to find suitable work opportunities. They also remained in contact with them for six months, visited them at work regularly and helped to solve a variety of problems, often acting as mediators between employer and employee.
Of the more than 600 people with hearing disabilities actively involved in project activities more than 400 were successfully employed.
These videos were broadcast on a number of Lithuanian national TV channels in 2010 and on the Internet
The project "Towards Work - development of mediation services in recruiting people with hearing disabilities" has won the RegioStars 2013 award in communication category "Promoting EU regional policy with short videos".