The Community Initiative EQUAL is a laboratory for new ideas to the European Employment Strategy and the Social inclusion process. Its mission was to promote a more inclusive work life through fighting discrimination and exclusion based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. EQUAL was implemented in and between Member States and was funded through the European Social Fund. Detailed information about EQUAL is available at following websites: ec.europa.eu/employment_social/equal and www.equal-esf.at.
Even during the development of the Austrian EQUAL programme, a strong wish was expressed by the federal state that the Community Initiative EQUAL should benefit from the TEPs. By integrating TEP actors into EQUAL Development Partnerships (DP) topics relevant to EQUAL could better be linked to labour market and educational policies. Additionally, the transfer of knowledge and methods between the actors could be enhanced (EQUAL-Programm Österreich 2000-2006).
In the first application round of EQUAL, the TEPs supported 26 Development Partnerships whilst in the second round the TEPs participated in the establishment and implementation of 17 DPs. Additionally, all TEPs created a joint development partnership overall Austrian provinces, called TEP_EQUAL_Elderly. In the framework of this DP all Pacts developed and tested a new instrument in labour market policy for older people called "Elderly-Plans" (see TEPs & Elderly).
Additional information in German is available at TEPs & EQUAL.