A number of initiatives have been developed to provide young people at risk of exclusion with opportunities to acquire the qualifications they need for the transition to work. One community initiative is the CIFER-Angus project. (Centre intégré de formation et de recyclage – Integrated Training and Retraining Centre.)

The CIFER-Angus is a job-entry firm specialising in computer recycling. It is a real production facility, subject to real market constraints. While initially much more formal, the instruction rapidly evolved to become largely informal, as Centre personnel became aware that knowledge could be passed on through practice, with minimal hours spent in the classroom. In fact, it is by offering jobs rather than training that the Centre recruits its young participants.

According to the director, the Centre’s hands-on approach, while maintaining the young people’s interest and facilitating their learning, has proven challenging for staff members, who often associate training with classroom instruction. But the requisite effort has been made to adapt the training practices because the Centre is intent on operating as a business, not as a place of training, or even less, as a school.

The young people hired by the Centre stay for a maximum of six months and are paid minimum wage for 35 hours a week. During the first few months, they undergo 30 hours of formal training; in addition, they rotate through all the possible jobs. Following this, they are assigned a specific job in accordance with their interests and abilities. During the last three weeks of their stay, they engage in a supervised job search, which is considered an integral part of the training process. More formalised follow-up might well prove beneficial, but it cannot be provided as the project’s financial backers do not permit readmission of a young person who has already benefited from the Centre’s services.

At the end of the process, most Centre "graduates" end up in a job unrelated to the computer field. This is perceived by project personnel as an indication of the transferability of the acquired skills. Paradoxically, the fact of undergoing practical training that is adapted to their needs has resulted in about one-quarter of the young people returning to school.

Currently, the Centre has local partnership links with the school board and the CEGEP. Together, they have worked on a pilot project for developing bridges between the job entry program and high school, searching for a way to achieve recognition as a semi-skilled trade for the learning acquired at the Centre. This part of the project is taking time to get off the ground, in part because of the time required for the development and recognition of new types of training by educational authorities.

For the Centre, finances are one of the main sources of insecurity. For example, computer recycling is a less profitable business than the assembly of new computers, but recycling enables the young trainees to acquire a lot of transferable knowledge. In addition, by working in recycling the company avoids competing with the private sector, an essential feature of its membership in the social economy.

Other constraints are imposed by the Centre’s sources of funding. Its training program is funded by Emploi-Québec through its «Préparation à l'emploi» ("Job Readiness") program, which is tending increasingly to reduce its allocations in favour of short-term training for individuals at the job access threshold. The rest of the funding comes from the Anti-Poverty Fund, which restricts the selection of clients: the trainees must be eligible for the Fund for their wages to be subsidized.

The success the Centre has experienced can be explained in part by its position in a particular niche of the social economy, which enables the business to be largely self-financed while remaining on the fringe of the market economy. An additional factor is the specific targeting of its clients, who are not burdened by excessive but are nevertheless excluded from the labour market.

A large reason for the project’s success is its highly media-friendly character. But this media-friendliness is probably the Achilles heel of this model in terms of its wider application. There is simply no place or any relevance in the eyes of politicians for hundreds of models of this same type. Moreover, to function effectively, this initiative requires significant investments and large amounts of working capital. These sums may appear prohibitive, although they probably represent the real price that must be paid at present to ensure to all citizens the place that is their due.