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Caritas Manila provides the poor with opportunities for self/wage employment. Aside from job fairs and parish job placement desks, Caritas develops parish-based cooperatives by training and empowering their leaders, and by giving the entrepreneurial poor access to credit.
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Job Assistance
Caritas Manila's Job Assistance program has two key channels for assisting the poor — the Parish Employment Assistance Desks, and regular Job Fairs. From January to December 2005, 1,474 job applicants were hired through 13 employment desks and 18 job fairs that were conducted.
The key to the program is effective coordination with prospective companies; making sure the job fairs are timed to bring hiring companies and appropriate job seekers together.
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Cooperative Development
Cooperatives are not just about credit. More importantly, they teach the value of saving for the future. The goal is to promote this as a way of life as much as a form of entrepreneurship. The strengthening of parish-based cooperatives is a key strategy of CM's livelihood development program, aimed at improving the socio-economic condition of urban-poor families in metro manila.
At the forefront of this program is the Union of Church Cooperatives, an association of church based cooperatives from six Metro Manila dioceses. Its guiding principle is cooperation and social responsibility. The thrust of UCC is to strengthen the leadership and management capabilities of member cooperatives. So far 15 member cooperatives are active under the union system.
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| More than building financial lifelines for its members, cooperative development focuses on social and spiritual development; on how people treat others and solve each others problems. It further strives to establish linkages with government, non-government organizations, and other cooperatives. |
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Microfinance Promotion
The comprehensive effort to help the urban poor improve their lives goes all the way to giving them access to funding for small livelihood projects. Caritas Manila is doing this by promoting microfinance programs to cooperatives and organizations and estalishing the Church's microfinance institution known as SALVE which stands for Savings and Livelihood with Values Education. SALVE's initial area of operation is the city of Kalookan. |
| SALVE helps the entrepreneurial poor get credit with reasonable interest rates through Cash flow-based and collateral-free lending. It combines financial services with values education, capacity building, and business development services for members. |
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