The Generalitat will allocate 25% of public housing for young people and dedicate an annual amount of almost 16.5 million euros to the rescue of children. They are just two of the 417 axes of the National Youth Plan Catalonia 2030, which “will have an impact of 531.7 million euros” and which will be presented this Jewish night in the Razzmatazz room in Barcelona by the president Pere Aragonès and Carles Campuzano, Counselor of Social Rights.
Ruth Ribas and Laia Girós, however, could not specify in a previous meeting with journalists how many apartments this 25% quota will translate into. The first is the general director of Joventut; and the second, the person in charge of the Catalan Youth Agency. The meager public housing stock is a recurring criticism in Catalonia. For this reason, another of the actions of the plan will reinforce rental aid.
The Agència de l’Habitatge de Catalunya, which centralizes the public housing supply of the Generalitat, will allocate a sum of 29 million euros (34.7, after the last extension) so that “those under 35 years of age can face “rental expenses.” These subsidies, of a maximum of 250 euros per month, depending on income and real estate characteristics of the area, will complement the state youth rental bonus.
The concepts of youth or not youth are increasingly complicated. The Italian journalist and writer Michele Serra (The Tired, in Alfaguara) assures that “getting old has become very difficult” because today’s parents “behave like young people and are ashamed of getting older,” while their children are forced to being young “up to 40 years old, without the necessary space to start working and assume their life.”
Although Michele Serra is not among the more than 2,300 people who have participated “in the process of consultation and preparation of the plan” (many, present last night at Razzmatazz, he could have done so. His statements coincide with the axes of the document, which raises “the right to emancipation understood in a broad sense.” And so broad, especially if one takes into account that some of its measures affect “those over 45 years of age.”
This is the case, for example, of aid for Dual Vocational Training, which allows students to study in an educational center and at the same time put into practice what they have learned in a company. The Generalitat includes as beneficiaries of these scholarships and internship contracts “those over 29 years of age at risk of social exclusion, as well as those over 45 who are long-term unemployed or affected by an ERE.”
The Government will allocate a total of 33 million euros to promote twelve-month training contracts that alternate theoretical and practical training. In this same chapter related to “quality work”, the almost 16.5 million euros annually that will be dedicated to rescuing NEETs “between 16 and 25 years old, without qualifications and job seekers” stand out. That is, “young people who neither study nor work.”
The program has a significant title, New Opportunities, and offers NEETs advice to “rediscover their professional objective and find their path to the world of work or back to the educational system.” It is about fighting against exclusion. Whether it is academic or work exclusion or whether it is residential exclusion, “especially for families with fewer resources.” But how to establish what those families are.
They are those with incomes of less than 23,725 euros per year, at least with regard to the possibility of aid to start a home. The plan ensures that public promotions of public housing “will increase”, although again without specifying when or how much, and insists that rural areas and medium-sized cities will be in the spotlight to reduce “the obstacles of young people when it comes to renting.” or the purchase.”
The 417 planned performances are very varied. They include a crash plan against school dropouts, the promotion of health and emotional well-being, environmental justice and “cultural, linguistic and digital rights”, among others. Many headings are defined with acronyms: SOC, FPCAT, FPO, XNEJ… Perhaps that is why a program with a name as nice as Odisseu is especially striking.
It took Odysseus (or Ulysses, for the Romans) twenty years to return to Ithaca from Troy. The homonymous program promotes “the return of young talent to rural areas” and facilitates “their employment and social insertion in these regions”, with the help of the Rural Agenda Secretary, the Catalan Youth Agency and (more acronyms !) AGAUR, acronym for the Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants, in Catalan.
The National Youth Plan Catalonia 2030 has so many grandiloquent phrases that other simple, but forceful observations may go unnoticed. This is one: “Youth policies are in no way an expense, but an investment for the present and the future.” And this, another: enabling the development of a free life project not only “influences the individual level, but also the collective level.”
