Service cooperative for educational actors:
families, education professionals, baby-sitters

NEEDS-BENEFICIARIES

The establishment of a service enterprise is the ultimate objective of the research and training effort that developed over the period 2005-2007 under Project “FEMALE JOB: family-work reconciliation systems for Milanese women”. The research actions that characterized the first phase of this activity aimed generally at identifying existing areas (zones and service types) potentially most suitable for the start-up of new early childhood services. It was deemed essential to perform an analysis of the Milan context so as to encourage the establishment of new enterprises in those areas that could offer the highest guarantees of attractiveness in terms of:

• meeting the unsatisfied/emerging needs of families
• potential demand
• economic sustainability
• favourable positioning in the competitive context.

The results of the research highlighted the need to set aside the initial idea to establish new early childhood services in favour of the start-up of new enterprises offering, on the one hand, support to parenting and, more generally, to the reconciliation of family life and work life, and on the other, services that are functional to support the child care services that already exist in the Milan territory. The enterprise identifies therefore various types of beneficiaries based on the offer of services, resulting from a cross-referencing of the skills of women entrepreneurs and the needs expressed by the territory:

• education professionals who can be employed in service centres or at home
• public and private educational services
• families.

WHICH ACTIONS TO MEET THE NEEDS
Based on research results and aware of the fact that every person and family have today several and complex needs, it was deemed appropriate to focus on the establishment of “other” services, in addition to the traditional ones, that take into account the actual needs of families, in order to both widen the range of psycho-pedagogical, logistic and organisational support to be offered to the families, and provide opportunities for dialogue and an exchange of experiences among families themselves. The enterprise identified the following sectors of intervention to try and fulfil the needs identified:

• AGENCY FOR EDUCATIONAL WORK

that can foster a satisfactory matching – both professionally and qualitatively- of work demand and supply in the educational field, it is a flexible structure, that can adjust to the market-context, able to set up a range of services including: databanks of qualified personnel, mediation and selection of educational staff, training and orientation consulting, guided training, refreshment courses, support for employment seekers. By contacting this service, companies will be able to find not only names and general curricula but also staff that was previously selected by experts, and education professionals will have the opportunity to rely on an agency that is totally devoted to their specific work field. The supply is therefore aimed specifically at cooperatives, private companies operating in the  childcare sector, social enterprises directly engaged in the provision of educational services and it can also meet the needs of families who decide to entrust their children with specialized professionals or support the demand for social services and parent counselling centres in their search for education professionals for targeted home care or family support.

• AGENCY FOR BABYSITTERS

The mission of the agency for Baby Sitters stems from two opposite premises to converge in a common horizon: on the one hand it focuses on the world of women looking for a job or wishing to re-enter the work market, with the objective of creating a work supply. The agency intends to attain this goal by training professionals specialised in child care: babysitting is a job that needs to be re-considered and enhanced. There are, indeed, numerous foreign girls or students who go into babysitting with no specific experience and do not approach this job as a profession proper. The objective is to enter this sector, that is too often amateurish and improvised, to train professionals who will be skilled, serious and reliable. On the other hand, the Agency for Baby sitters will focus on the private sphere of pregnant women, women with very young children or pre-school children, who have to or wish to re-enter the work market. The agency will collect the demand of these women – at times an implicit one – to decode it and define together a support plan that is flexible and tailor-made.
Lastly, the Agency for Baby Sitters will match supply and demand through the establishment of a professional register. In this sense the agency is simply a go-between and stands guarantor for those who are listed in the registry or directly mediates between families and professionals.

• PARENTAL SUPPORT SERVICES

In the past few years families have experienced evident structural and cultural changes, that have had considerable repercussions on the organisation of society as a whole.
The decision to draw up a project for families stems from the need to rethink the concept of “working family” not only in sectorial or partial terms, but precisely by stressing their central role in the social context of Milan.
In this scenario it seems appropriate to propose services that can provide meeting and training opportunities where parents can express their need for help or psychological support at special moments in time, so as to provide assistance without resorting to clinical consulting. Family counselling services will be made available, also to support women struggling to balance their family and professional life, as well as child-birth preparatory courses – psycho-educational support for mothers-to-be, orientation on available services in the territory, support for foreign parents.

ACTORS
The establishment of the Service Enterprise aimed at education actors saw the participation of all project partners at different moments and levels; starting with those directly involved in the creation of the  enterprise, who worked in close contact with the research staff and the workgroup in charge of project design. All the phases leading to the establishment of the cooperative were deeply interconnected and synergic, and carefully coordinated by the project’s Lead Partner. A crucial role was played by the women – the final beneficiaries of this project – who were selected to attend the course for “Socio-pedagogical Consultant” who embarked on their journey to become professional entrepreneurs through accompaniment and consulting for business start-up and management.  

METHODOLOGY
The research phase devoted to the analysis of demand highlighted a marked need for parental support services, educational services such as Time for families and information on all the services present on the territory that could be useful to families with children up to 3 years of age. The project opted for the promotion of the establishment of new enterprises offering, on the one hand, parental support services, and more generally, to reconcile family and work life, on the other services that are functional to support child care services already existing in the territory of Milan.
A course was therefore set up for “socio-pedagogical consultants” aimed at creating the skills required to:

• Support and qualify education professionals working in the various types of services
• Guide expert education professionals towards greater awareness of their professionalism
• Offer consulting in the educational field to assist working mothers with young children
• Provide consulting of a pedagogical-organizational nature to early childhood educational services and to facilitate the development of programmes aimed at supporting the reconciliation of family and work life.

At the end of this training course several participants interested in this field developed an entrepreneurial idea, supported and developed through the coaching and consulting activities for business start-up envisaged in the project, which resulted in the establishment of an enterprise, with a business plan defined by matching the skills and aspirations of future partners with the context data emerged from the research, and an evaluation of its attractiveness in terms of potential demand, fulfilment of target user needs and therefore of overall attractiveness and feasibility. 

RELEVANT POINTS

• Detailed analysis of the needs in the territory in the research phase
• Strong systemic element in the development and strengthening of public-private cooperation  to improve the services offered to citizens. The synergy between public and private bodies is an added value aimed at the participation of subjects from different systems and enables to set up a dialogue aimed at cooperation where differences are an asset and not an obstacle.

Future success in terms of business sustainability will certainly depend on the ability of the enterprise to position its offer on the market, but also significantly on the support provided by Public Institutions. Specifically by the Council for Work Policies and Occupation of the City of Milan, the project’s Lead Partner, that in the project design and drafting phase functioned as a strategically important incubator, also by offering common structures and logistical spaces, and secondly through the will and proposal to evaluate forms of agreement and/or collaboration to be established with the enterprise.