Whishing you happy holidays, from the Euricse Team!

2022 Highlights

We would like to share with you some of the highlights of these past twelve months, during which we have strengthened our research, consulting and training activities on highly relevant and topical issues, both established and new ones. This year was also witness to the renewal of the Board of Directors and the passing of the baton from Carlo Borzaga to the newly confirmed President of Euricse, Mario Diani.

Our research developments

We continued our research on measuring the dimensions of the social economy, publishing the new Report on Trentino Cooperatives and the eleventh World Cooperative Monitor with the International Cooperative Alliance.
We explored new dimensions of the role of the social economy with the first Report on Enterprising Communities, a study on nine types of community-based civic engagement initiatives developing across Italy and a new research report dedicated to the role of Third Sector organizations in the delivery of healthcare and social welfare services in Italy
On the topic of work integration, we oversaw the research report of the B-Wise project, conducted in partnership with two major European networks (ENSIE and EASPD), and twenty-eight other partners from thirteen EU countries. We also kicked-off and produced a research report for the Momentum project, co-funded by the European Union’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, with a focus on the socio-economic integration of migrant and refugee women through the social economy.
As part of a broader international cooperation project, together with CIRIEC-Brasil, we presented a bilingual report on new opportunities for shared development  through analysis of case studies in Brasil and Trentino.
We explored the themes of collaborative welfare systems and local development, proposing studies and reflections on tools for strengthening social and health services delivered in a territorial and integrated manner, on co-design and co-programming services for the community, and on forms of financing and policies to support the social economy.
With some pride, we can also say that we have contributed to enriching the Encyclopedia of the Social and Solidarity Economy published by the United Nations Observatory on the Social and Solidarity Economy, with three articles on social economy finance and the role of social economy organizations in the reception of migrants. 

From theory to business practices

As is inherent in our mission, we have sought to apply our research results to the support of business practices, strengthening our consulting activities on social impact measurement, strategic planning, and network development.
We have been involved in numerous strategic consulting projects for social enterprises and other Third Sector organizations, such as those in Piedmont and Liguria funded by the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation for organizational development plans, or in Lecco for the design of a new type of social-occupational service, in Bergamo to work on the skills of consortium managers, in Trento on the structuring of Solidarity Economy Districts, among many others. 2022 has also seen the advancement of the activities of the SEED project, for which we are contributing to the design of evaluation methodologies for social innovation projects.
We have supported more than 200 organizations throughout Italy, including social cooperatives, consortia and associations, in conducting social impact assessment, using the ImpACT Method, which is also available to all Third Sector entities large and small, either as individual organizations or networks.

Engaging training activities

We also invested in new training projects about cooperative entrepreneurship, like Coop Mindset, with the Universities of Trento, Bolzano and Palermo and others, and Feel Coop, designed especially for young students.
In order to strengthen cooperative business training worldwide, Euricse has been taking an active role in the International Co-operative Business Education Consortium (ICBEC) and has joined as a full member. During the last months we have participated in the activities of the consortium and in the working group as well as served as the secretariat.
With the decades of experience of the Master GIS program (the 27th edition kicked off this October), this year we created an online course and a multimedia guide on the topic of managing social enterprises.
Regarding events, we successfully organized the 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Responsible Finance for Development and a training day focused on collaborative welfare in partnership with Erickson, a prelude to new collaborations and new training activities.

In the forefront when it comes to the social economy

Always taking an active role in the national and international public debate, we signed with the National Economic and Labor Council a collaboration agreement to spread the growth of the social economy in Italy and measure its social and productive impact. We have also been involved in the main Italian conferences and festivals dedicated to the economy and society. Among these, in Trento on July 15, was the inaugural conference of the activities of the Monitoring Committee of the Luxembourg Declaration on Social and Solidarity Economy in Europe, whose presidency was assigned to Italy for 2022. Also, bringing expertise derived from over a decade of research and analysis on topics related to the social economy, and the reflections arising from our presence at the international level, we contributed to the establishment in Italy of an Alliance among all organizations working in the Social Economy. The resulting Manifesto for the Social Economy was presented by the Alliance of Italian Cooperatives in Bologna, describing the new social and economic scenarios, intended to contribute to the Commission Recommendation to the European Council on the social economy in 2023. At the international level we continued our work within the European Commission Expert Group on Social Economy and Social Enterprises (GECES) and in the United Nations Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE). We are members of the EU Pact for Skills and look forward to contributing actively to the 2023 European Year of Skills. This year we also contributed to the EU Commission’s work on the Transition Pathway for Proximity and Social Economy through analysis of survey results and contributions to the reports outlining actions to support and foster the green and digital transition for the social and proximity economy.

Last but not least… to improve our ability to disseminate our research and communicate our activities, we updated our website and added an Instagram profile to the list of our social channels.
The website for the Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity (JEOD), Euricse’s international scientific journal, was also renewed. Another issue of the journal was just recently published, along with five original contributions for Euricse’s Working Paper series.

Whishing you happy holidays, from the Euricse Team!