History
The European Social Fund was created in the founding Treaty of Rome in 1957; it is the oldest of the Structural Funds. While the ESF has always taken higher employment as its objective, it has adapted its focus over the years to meet the challenges of the time. In the early post-war years, it concentrated on managing the migration of workers within Europe. Later it moved on to combating unemployment among the young and poorly qualified.
In the current funding period, 2007–2013, as well as targeting support at those with particular difficulties in finding work, such as women, young people, older workers, migrants and people with disabilities, ESF funding is also helping businesses and workers adapt to change. It does this by supporting innovation in the workplace, lifelong learning and the mobility of workers.
Read more about this topic: European Social Fund
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)