As part of the INTERREG "IMAGINE" project (2019-2023), the Lycée Technique Agricole (LTA) and the Forum pour l'Emploi (FPE), in collaboration with the Agency for the Agence pour le Développement de l’Emploi (National Center for employment) and the Centre d’Orientation Socio-Professionnelle (COSP), continued the seven-month training programme in market gardening, dedicated to young people who currently are not in education, employment or training (NEETs).
Convinced of the “integrating” and “healing” power of working with the soil and plants in the context of market gardening, the project in Luxembourg focused on the most vulnerable groups in our society - people with disabilities - who often face more problems to find their place in our hectic world.
In February 2021, seven candidates started their training course with the COSP. After six weeks, five of them extended their training course at the FPE and joined the market gardening team of “am Gaertchen” while remaining together as the “IMAGINE group”. This was not only to stimulate team spirit and gain confidence as quick as possible, but also to implement the concept of “co-production”, specific to the IMAGINE project with a support according to the principle of “You are OK, I am OK !”.
The NEETs' experience at the FPE was complemented by basic theoretical courses in market gardening given by teachers from the LTA, to provide them a complete picture of the profession, necessary to properly orient the personal and professional courses of young people in the future.
The concept of co-production has been a main pillar of the IMAGINE project from the very beginning. It concerns all the people involved in the project (NEETs, coaches, etc.) and it is about “discovering, defining, developing and delivering” together but also through each other at all levels. At the beginning, there was a certain skepticism towards this approach, but in the end a very good experience has been developed thanks to this method.
Through a series of videos entitled “IMAGINE portraits”, we can discover several testimonies of young people who followed the IMAGINE training in market gardening in different countries. You can see above the video portrait of one of the Luxembourgish candidates.
