Work life balance is always difficult and for parents in particular, engaged into ‘acrobatic’ efforts to combine two domains with often diverging rhythms and needs, and in a socio-economic context featured by unstable job conditions and welfare cuts.
Although there has been a decline in average working time, an increase in unpaid overtime has been recorded, which indicates significant implications for the work/life balance of a family: for low-income families and for those where both parents are working, childcare issues have become a challenge now more than ever.
The H2020 ICT-CAPs project Families_Share project will tackle the above mentioned challenges leveraging on a model based on ‘alternative economies’, and stimulating families to share time and collaborate through digital technologies in their neighborhood networks.
The overall objective of the project is therefore to develop a social networking and awareness platform dedicated to childcare and work life balance. The Open Source platform will build on neighbourhood networks enabling citizens to come together and share tasks, time and skills relevant to childcare and after school education/leisure.
The platform will be co-designed with families in 7 EU cities (Venezia, Bologna, Trento, Thessaloniki, Budapest, Hamburg, Kortrijk) and tested jointly with a series of communication campaigns and raising awareness events.
Families_Share will be targeted to all working parents (or in search of a job) with a special attention to low income families, precarious workers and all those who are struggling in affording paid care services. The project will have a focus on including migrant people and all type of families (single parents, all sexual orientations, elderly people living alone).
A cross cutting issue will inevitably be gender equality, translated into the goal of an equal involvement of mothers and fathers to challenge stereotypes constructing childcare as a female task only (or mainly).
Project partners are: Fondazione Bruno Kessler, ViLabs, IMEC, Smart Venice, Regional Environmental Centre, Ergani, De Stuyverij.