International Foundation for Interdisciplinary Health Promotion

Marginalised youth, particularly those with limited access to education, struggle to enter the job market, and without comprehensive support and guidance may never be able to do it.

IFIHP is an NPO raising funds for the Corporate Work-Study Program GPS to the future, a career development project that offers work, education, guidance and mentoring in order to develop the academic and professional career of vulnerable youth, and by doing so break the cycle of poverty and exposure to health risks they live in.

The motivation for raising funds is to pilot and make successful in South Africa an initiative that has shown to work with hardened youth in other settings. The project is inspired in an initiative that has successfully run in USA since 1996 and that at present employs and educates 6000 previously disadvantaged youth. After 1 ½ years of implementation in Spain, the program has carried out individualized guidance and mentoring for 77 ABET students: 28 of them planned to finish equivalent to grade 9 in June 2011, and 27 achieved their objective; 25 of the students finishing equivalent of Grade 9 have applied to continue with further education, for the most part, in equivalent to FET colleges; all the students defined a career development action plan and a 71.4% achieved one to three objectives of their plan; In total, 462 people have participated in the program through workshops, individual guidance, mentoring, online self-assessment tools, after-school support and/or visits to educational institutions.

The International Foundation for Interdisciplinary Health Promotion (IFIHP) is an NPO focused in developing holistic programs that promote health by addressing the conditions where individuals and communities live, and that include, among others, education and occupation.