EQUAL Community Initiative - introduction

Community Initiative EQUAL is a part of the European Union strategy for creation of a larger number of better workplaces and for ensuring a wide access to them. EQUAL means new manners of solving the discrimination problems on the labour market.

The objective of Community Initiative EQUAL, financed by the European Social Funds (ESF), is to test and promote – within international co-operation – new ways of combating all forms of discrimination and inequality on the labour market, affecting both the employed and job seekers. EQUAL includes also activities for asylum seekers.

EQUAL enables the identification and anticipation of changes on the labour market, and provides new tools for the monitoring, preventing and solving identified problems.

General principles of the implementation include:

1. Thematic approach
2. Development Partnerships - DPs
3. Empowerment
4. Transnational co-operation
5. Innovation
6. Mainstreaming

Those principles are common for all Member States participating in the implementation of Community Initiative EQUAL and they specify the manner of implementation (e.g. projects implemented not by individual project providers, but by Development Partnerships, i.e. several institutions or organizations implementing a project within jointly agreed objectives), and constitute criteria for the selection of projects to be financed within EQUAL.

Projects financed within EQUAL are selected in a nation-wide call for proposals. In 2004-2006 (implementation period of the second round of the Programme in the Member States) applications to EQUAL are collected only once. In Poland, applications to EQUAL could have been submitted between 7 June and 31 August 2004.

EQUAL Community Initiative Programme is the basis for the implementation of EQUAL in Poland. This document specifies objectives, thematic scope and system of implementation of EQUAL Initiative in Poland in 2004-2006.

Download a file:
Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions establishing the guidelines for the second round of the Community Initiative EQUAL concerning transnational co-operation to promote new means of combating all forms of discrimanation and inequalities in connection with the labour market >>

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