SEEING YOUTH PROJECT HAS STARTED

The SEEing Youth: Supporting, Educating and Enabling Youth Project, funded by the European Union and jointly implemented by the Cyprus Turkish Association of Managers, the Human Resources Management Association and PeacePlayers-Cyprus, has started.

The main goal of the project is to provide the youth with an environment that facilitates their social and professional development with an intersectoral and multidisciplinary approach. In addition, the project will also conduct research in different fields to strengthen youth employment, initiatives to improve the professional capacities of young people and institutions, and to make the private sector more active in the field of social responsibility projects through youth.

SEEing Youth offered paid internship opportunities to young people wanting to gain work experience in the months of July and August 2022 as a continuation of the Inspire the Future Project, which was successfully carried out and completed between 2018 and 2020. Anyone over the age of 18 can apply to the internship programme, which will offer training and workshop opportunities as well as work experience.

In order to reach young people from every region in the northern part of Cyprus, this year’s internship programme will offer positions in a variety of institutions and organisations in different regions.

At the project’s opening event held on 13.04.2022, Çiğdem Dürüst, head of the Cyprus Turkish Executives Association’s board, stated that “Bringing young people who are waiting to be employed together with the people who provide employment opportunities, while serving mutual interest for both the employees and employers also benefits the country as a whole. Thus, there is a wave of serenity that spreads from civil society to people and from people to the society. Our association has done this before. We were encouraged and we decided to continue again with the support of the EU Programma Support Office’s grant programme. They believed in us and trusted us. We thank them very much…”.

Furthermore, Michael Docherty, Head of the Department of the European Union Programme Support Office, highlighted the importance of the project for Turkish Cypriot youth, with the statement: “If young Turkish Cypriots do not believe that they have a decent standard of living and a future where they can utilise their talents and abilities, then they will leave the island. The brightest and the best will leave and this would be a disaster for a small society…”

The project team stated that they will announce the internship programme and all other activities that will take place within the scope of the project through their Facebook and Instagram pages and on the www.seeingyouth.org website.