The aim of the partnership is to stimulate cross-border operations for mutual and cooperatives to enable them to use the full potential of the internal market in order to expand the activities of social economy, through interregional collaboration activities. The partnership intends to deal with several challenges related to S3 and social economy such as, how to:
The sector accounts for 2 million businesses, representing 10% of all European enterprises, and employ over 14 million paid employees (6.5% of the working population in the EU).
The partership builds on other initiatives targeting:
- develop social economy clusters;
- create European value chains of social economy enterprises belonging to different regions in Europe;
- improve the cooperation between enterprises and other territorial actors, especially those who have technological and innovative competences.
The sector accounts for 2 million businesses, representing 10% of all European enterprises, and employ over 14 million paid employees (6.5% of the working population in the EU).
The partership builds on other initiatives targeting:
- existing fragmentation in social economy, implementing interregional social economy financing mechanisms that allow for sharing risks and facilitating access to financing under favourable conditions and exploring shared use of machinery and infrastructures (DG GROW Pilot Action “European Social Economy Regions 2018”),
- providing local actors with the necessary skills to generate and develop collaborative projects based on territorial potential (ETESS - INTERREG POCTEFA project with the participation of Navarra regiona, Basque Country and New Aquitaine),
- sharing and exchanging best practices and experiences in the field of public policy to support social enterprises (Interreg Europe project “RaiSE with the participation of ERVET and Örebro region),
- supporting joint solutions to challenges hindering the development of social economy, thus promoting new approaches to overcome a fragmented approach to policies supporting social economy (ESSI – European Support to Social Innovation financed by Horizon 2020 - Innosup with the participation of the following regional development agencies: ERVET from Italy, ADA from Turkey, KAINUUN ETU from Finland and IVACE from Spain).