Women Without Borders

We will discuss, for example, how parents and schools can recognise the first warning signs, how accessible psychological and psychiatric help is today, what role school psychologists, paediatricians, counselling centres and non-profit organisations play, and where young people most often run into obstacles in the support system.

The second part of the meeting will be devoted to the question:

How is a young person at 17 or 18 supposed to know what they want to be?

Many students leave secondary school without a clear idea of their abilities, their options and the real labour market. Some go on to university only because it is expected, others choose a field without enough information, and still others have no idea where to start looking for work.

We therefore want to open up the topic of modern career orientation — not as a one-off test, but as a longer process that helps a young person get to know their own abilities, interests, personality and real options.

We will look for answers to the question of how to better connect:

schools – parents – psychologists – career counsellors – companies – universities – public institutions.

We are also interested in whether students should have more opportunities for short-term internships, mentoring, company visits or meetings with people from different professions before they finish school.

An important question will also be the link between the two topics. Uncertainty about the future is not only a matter of career. For a young person it can mean a feeling of failure, a loss of self-confidence or long-term psychological strain.

That is why we want to look for a model that does not merely tell a young person:

“You have to decide what you will do.”

But helps them find out:

“What am I good at? What interests me? What are my options? Where can I try it out? And who will help me take the next step?”

As at previous meetings of the Women Without Borders platform, we do not want to stop at general discussion. The aim is to connect experts, schools, parents, young people, public institutions and employers, and to look for concrete possibilities for cooperation and practical solutions.

The Women Without Borders platform is built on a simple principle:

ASK & OFFER – What do you need? What can you offer?

This principle can be of exceptional importance especially around the younger generation. One person can offer professional help, another mentoring, another an internship, work experience, a contact or inspiration.

The mental health and professional future of young people are not two separate topics. They are part of the same question: how to create an environment in which a young person can grow up safely, get to know themselves and find their place in society.

During the meeting we focused mainly on these questions:

• how a debt trap arises when a person moves between different forms of employment and is not properly informed about mandatory contributions;
• what role health and social insurance play, and how older debts, penalties and instalment plans can be dealt with;
• why it can be hard for a woman aged 55+ to find stable employment even after years of effort and dozens or hundreds of CVs sent out;
• what tools the Labour Office has for people who genuinely want to move into legal employment;
• what happens when a person owns their home but does not have enough income for everyday living costs;
• how debt repayment can be set up so that a person can at the same time pay for housing, basic needs and their family;
• why individual institutions are often able to deal only with “their part” of the problem, while no one leads the whole case from the beginning to a real result.

One of the important topics was also the line between individual responsibility and the responsibility of the system.

Our aim is not to relieve people of personal responsibility. But it is equally not enough to say: “Find a job and pay off your debts.” If legal employment means immediate enforcement against income, while the person still has to pay for housing and everyday costs and support a family, a paradoxical situation can arise in which the move into legal work is economically almost impossible.

This is where we ran into one of the main problems of the current system: every institution deals with only one part of a life situation, but the person needs one functioning path.

That is why we discussed a model in which a single concrete case would bring around one table people from social services, the Labour Office, the health insurance company, a debt counselling centre, employers and possibly other experts.

The basic question was:

What can your institution do at this specific point — and what can it not do?

And then:

What needs to change so that a person does not merely pass from one institution to another, but has a real chance of getting back to a stable and legal life?

The meeting confirmed one of the core ideas of the Women Without Borders platform: real solutions often do not arise inside one institution, but between institutions.

That is why we want to develop the ASK & OFFER principle further — What do you need? What can you offer? Every participant can bring part of the solution: legal knowledge, a job opportunity, experience with the social system, mentoring, a contact, expert advice or the ability to connect other people.

In future we want to use such cases as practical case studies, in which we can identify the specific places where the system fails and at the same time propose realistic solutions.

One option is to create a pilot programme for a smaller group of women aged 55+, combining employment, debt counselling, social support and individual case coordination.

We therefore do not want to build Women Without Borders only as a space for networking and discussion.

We want to create a place where a concrete problem meets concrete people who hold part of the solution — and where a new functioning model can emerge from this cooperation.

This is where we see the meaning of horizontal cooperation between civil society, experts, public institutions and business.

Together we opened a discussion about the direction the platform should take, which topics matter to women living in Prague and in the Czech Republic, and how the platform can help not only through general support but also through concrete work on individual cases.

We spoke about the need for mutual connection and for sharing contacts, experience and expertise, but also about how many women find themselves between systems in various life situations — between family and work, between integration and isolation, between business and administration, between personal responsibility and insufficient support.

The goal of the Women Without Borders platform is to create space for practical collaboration among women across nationalities, professions and life experiences. The platform intends to address current topics, analyse specific cases, look for possible solutions and connect women with experts, institutions, the non-profit sector and public administration.

The first meeting confirmed that the platform can be a place where personal experience becomes a shared topic, where new contacts, concrete projects and space for the voices of women who want to be an active part of society come into being.

The meeting was a first step towards creating an open working platform that will gradually develop its goals, working formats, thematic groups, case studies and concrete projects focused on supporting women, integration, collaboration and public dialogue.