The main economic costs borne by informal care cover three different domains: “Employment consequences, Out-of-pocket expenses and Caregiving labor” (Keating, Lero, Fast, Lucas & Eales, 2013). Many young carers are hidden. They are forgotten or ignored by policy makers and service providers at national and local levels; they do not feature in the literature on community care, family care and children’s rights; and young carers’ experiences and needs are not explicitly recognized in social and family policies.
For those young adults the load at its peak, the choice of education is based on location, their vocational choices are based on family situations, and the intergenerational challenges are present. Within the project, we will target young carers, youth workers working for young carers and entrepreneurs and offer learning opportunities so that they can develop their social entrepreneurial skills.
Young carers are a group at risk of social exclusion, whose career and educational opportunities are often limited by the role they play in the family. This situation necessitates professional support from multiple sources. Not only does it concern health services and education support services, but it may also call for family services, and in many cases support via the professional care and care counseling sector.
A social entrepreneur is a person who pursues novel applications that have the potential to solve community-based problems. These individuals are willing to take on the risk and effort to create positive changes in society through their initiatives.
Widespread use of ethical practices such as impact investing, conscious consumerism, and corporate social responsibility programs facilitate the success of social entrepreneurs.
We wish to exchange good practices between Greece, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey in the topic of support of young caregivers in Social Entrepreneurship. as a way to support those people in their professional life.
Who are young carers
According to Cree (2003), a young carer is a person aged 5-25 whose life is affected by the illness or disability of someone in his or her family. They may provide physical or emotional support for that person. Young carers may care for relatives who have a physical or learning disability, mental health problem, chronic illness or alcohol misuse problem. According to Becker, (2000), a particularly vulnerable group, that we will focus on, are young adults age 18-25. Informal care is generally defined as unpaid care provided to older and dependent people by a person with whom they have a social relationship, such as a spouse, parent, child, other relative, neighbour, friend or other non-kin (Triantafillou et al., 2010).
This care is too often overlooked by researchers and policymakers and is frequently not systematically recorded or monitored given its ‘informal’ nature and the fact it takes place in the private sphere. The challenges posed by population ageing nevertheless call for efforts to assess the value of these invisible and growing care responsibilities, which are putting greater pressure on carers across Europe. Similarly, both researchers and policymakers need to acknowledge and evaluate the contribution made by informal care to the overall production of care in order to appreciate carers’ share in the total costs of care.