Two groups of young people who don’t meet every day in real life. In Brno, people who leave foster homes will start living with university students next year. Photo: Brno-střed Town Hall
Brno, Feb 24 (BD) – The contract for cooperation and lease of the house was signed on Thursday by representatives of the Brno-střed Town Hall and the Symbios project, created at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University.
The house for lease is a building at Křenová 57 which, after reconstruction, will serve as a common living space for people leaving the foster homes and students of Masaryk University, Masaryk University spokeswoman Tereza Fojtová said this Thursday.
“Young adults do not have it easy after they leave foster homes; they do not have money, they need to get housing, find a first job and also establish new social contacts,” said Bohuslav Binka, project head and head of the Department of Environmental Studies in the Faculty of Social Studies, in the official press release.
In order to make it simpler in the beginning of their independent lives, they will have the opportunity to live together with students of Masaryk University for a slightly reduced rent.
“At the same time, the project envisages that the [newly] integrated residents of this house will get their first job opportunities from the project partners,” Fojtová explained.
There will be eight two-bedroom apartments (‘2+1’), each occupied by one undergraduate and one young adult from a foster home.
The project was facilitated by the Brno-Centre (Brno-střed) Town Hall, which provided a house for rent and financed CZK 35 million worth of renovations.
The project received CZK 103,000 from 277 citizens and organizations in a crowdfunding campaign on the Czech server Hithit in 2015-2016. (The last contributions were made in January 2016).
The house is currently undergoing renovations which should be finished by the end of this year. The first tenants should move in at the beginning of 2019, Fojtová added.
“We want to build an environment where these two groups will live together, work and learn under one roof,” Binka wrote on Hithit.
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