Press Release | Ireland in European Collaboration to Engage Employers to Support Lone Parents in the Workplace
In Ireland, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Scotland, new programmes promote work-family balance to support parents to enter and stay in employment.
One Family – Ireland’s organisation for people parenting alone, sharing parenting, and separating –has developed two professional learning programmes designed to support lone parents and employers to work together to forge better work-family balance practices in Ireland,Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Scotland.
One Family has collaborated with four other European organisations that provide supports and services for one-parent families: APERIO in the Czech Republic; Berufundfamilie in Germany; Intermedia in Italy; and One Parent Families Scotland (OPFS). These innovative programmes,which involve parents and employers through online learning, have been created in response to the urgent need to improve access for people parenting alone to the job market in a more effective and fair way. The aim of the programmes is to contribute to lowering the risk of poverty for one-parent family households and to enable parents to unlock their full potential in contributing to the workforce.This is phase two of a four year collaboration with four programmes developed in total.
Valerie Maher, One Family Programme Manager,comments: “Lone parents want to make better futures for their children. In attempting to balance employment with parenting in a society where parenting requirements are often not recognised, many lone parents become employed in less qualified, lower paying and precarious employment, sometimes on zero hour contracts.They often suffer in-work poverty as a result. One Family will be engaging closely with employers in Ireland to design and implement the best approaches when working with lone parents as employees. We are providing easily accessible tools which will benefit employers and lone parents by supporting them to work more efficiently together which can achieve the potential of lone parents as employees to benefit their families and their employers.”
Two programmeshave been produced and piloted over the two-year period from 2016-2018:
- Online training for lone parents in employment who struggle to stay employed and progress in their roles.
- Online training for HR specialists and employers who want to benefit from the professional potential of lone parents and retain experienced staff.
For further information, visit www.onefamily.ie and www.strongerfamilies.eu
#WorkFamilyBalance #StrongerFamilies
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
