Maternity Opportunities and Mainstreaming

(https://www.facebook.com/MOM-EU-Project-1962331810647816/ )

Associazione Piano C (www.pianoc.it): 2017-1-IT02-KA204-036691

Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership (2017-2020) IT, BG, ES, GR, NO, UK

Built on a new concept of maternal resilience, capable of breaking the toughest stereotype about mothers at work, the overall MOM project is aimed at appraising the skills that woman naturally learn during motherhood, in an employability perspective.

The specific MOM’s aim is to transfer, adapt and exploit the method carried out by Piano C  with a target of unemployed mothers,  then design an European innovative training program to turn parental skills into job skills, assessing it according to the ECVET framework. MOM’s set of competences comes mainly from a non-formal, informal learning process. One of the project expected results is making these competences visible, validated and recognized in order to capitalize the learning results in an EU perspective.

The second aim is to create an e-Campus where unemployed mothers and caregivers can find open training tools aimed at reinforcing their employability, assessing and enhancing their motherhood competences and developing other professional skills. They will join a peer community where find motivation, information, suggestions and opportunities aimed at fostering and reinforcing their presence in the job market.

MOM’s target groups are mothers that lost their jobs due to maternity; women who face difficulties in finding a job because they are mothers; women returners; single mothers who need to improve their job presence, and; pregnant women who want to reinforce their competences for a future job.

Motherhood  is still seen as a “period of crisis” within companies and even within people themselves. The percentage of women that don’t go back to work after the maternity is high in all the involved countries, motherhood is either managed with attention and care, but with high costs – through supporting programs, psychological counselling etc. – or it is considered as a phase of professional and personal weakening, after which nothing will be the same.

However, there is plenty of scientific and sociological evidence demonstrating that motherhood is a moment of intellectual development, skill growth and explosion of energies. If only for the simple fact that nature is concerned with propagating life and therefore it endows new mothers with enhanced abilities and survival instincts.

Moreover, there is a clear affinity between the complex environment that a parent needs to manage within the family (regarding the intensity of the relationships, the development of authority, the desire for habilitation of others, and motivational and listening skills) and the modern workplaces, that nowadays require more and more empathic and interpersonal skills.

The MOM main activities will be:

– to adopt and adapt the maam method with a target group of unemployed women;

– to design an European training program to turn parental skills into organizational skills, assessing it according to the ECVET, making competences visible, validated and recognized;

– to make the innovative method free available and easily accessible to the target group, though open, free online resources.

The innovative MOM method will change the paradigm of motherhood in the workplace in a revolutionary way.