Towards a New Strategy for the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) in Europe 1

Strategy Supporting Mechanisms

1. Communication and Narrative: Building a New Cultural Imagination
SSE must tell stories that make solidarity tangible and visible—sharing clear examples that counter fear and populist rhetoric. Redefining “development” as social well-being and equality, rather than just economic growth, is crucial. But communication goes further: it’s about challenging the “common sense” of neoliberalism, which treats markets as natural and care as a private responsibility.
At the same time, SSE must confront a key risk: it is still often perceived as a middle-class project (at least in Europe), disconnected from workers, low-paid jobs, and everyday working-class realities. Strengthening the movement requires explicitly naming and addressing this gap—not by speaking about poverty from above, but by grounding narratives and practices in working-class experiences and struggles that many SSE actors themselves are affected by.
By sharing alternative ways of thinking and organizing, SSE makes it clear that other worlds are already being built—through community food systems, feminist care projects, migrant-led cooperatives, and ecological commons. These are not marginal experiments; they are living proof that solidarity and collective responsibility work in practice.
These stories must be built from lived practice. Rather than abstract or overly intellectual discourse, narrative work should start from real experiences, contradictions, and limits—acknowledging that SSE actors are not always consistent in practice, while holding true to a shared ethical horizon of coherence and transformation.
Embedding these narratives in public culture helps SSE reclaim imagination as a space for hope and change.
This process should be collective and relational: stories co-created arm by arm with practitioners, workers, community members, youth, and artists, rather than spoken on their behalf. Youth cultural associations, grassroots artists, and community media can play a key role in translating SSE values into accessible, emotional, and politically grounded cultural expressions.
Indicative Actions:
Develop a Narrative and Imagination Strategy:
Create a coordinated communications strategy to present SSE as a movement for transformation. Use storytelling platforms, multimedia campaigns, exhibitions, and publications to showcase real-life successes.
Prioritize voices from frontline SSE practices, workers, care providers, farmers, migrants, and young people, ensuring narratives reflect working-class realities and collective struggles rather than institutional language.
Advance Popular Education for Narrative Change:
Train activists and community leaders in narrative tools—like storytelling and collective analysis—to strengthen political organizing and challenge dominant myths.
Popular education processes should link narrative work to class consciousness, helping articulate shared conditions of exploitation and dispossession while avoiding charity-based or depoliticized framings.
Support Cultural and Community-Based Practices that Make SSE Visible
Encourage festivals, community kitchens, cooperative markets, and neighborhood assemblies that allow people to experience solidarity in practice. These spaces should function as living narratives—where SSE values are not only communicated but enacted through shared work, food systems, care practices, and cultural expression.
Such initiatives help translate political imagination into everyday experience, particularly in working-class neighborhoods and territories affected by economic abandonment.

2. Strategic Alliances: Building a New Social Bloc
The Social and Solidarity Economy cannot create systemic change alone. Real transformation depends on building strong alliances across different movements—climate justice, feminism, commons, labor rights, food sovereignty, democracy, and decolonization. The challenge is to move beyond short-term cooperation and instead weave lasting relationships that can confront authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and ecological breakdown together.
This means engaging in dialogue and joint action both inside and outside institutions, and working toward unified platforms for collective struggle. Within these alliances, it’s also vital to nurture our own movements by building accountability and care, addressing internal oppressions like patriarchy and racism, and making space for all identities and experiences.
Resourcing these convergences requires new strategies—like community-controlled finance models, cooperative banks, Indigenous-led funds, and solidarity currencies—that provide the legal, technical, and financial support needed for autonomy. Alliances should also reach beyond traditional boundaries, especially by strengthening ties with workers’ movements and trade unions. Connecting SSE and labor movements is essential for tackling inequality, labor rights, and rural–urban solidarity, and for anchoring SSE within a broader bloc for systemic change.
Key Actions:
Forge Cross-Movement Platforms:
Establish regular spaces for dialogue and coordination across social movements, trade unions, and community networks. Examples include joint assemblies on just transition and workers’ rights, feminist and decolonial dialogues, and regional forums connecting urban and rural struggles.
Coordinate Joint Campaigns and Solidarity Actions
Promote concrete forms of collaboration between SSE actors, trade unions, and social movements through coordinated campaigns, mutual support in social movements, solidarity supply chains, and cooperative responses to crises (food, energy, housing, care). These shared actions should demonstrate in practice how alliances can defend livelihoods, reclaim resources, and expand democratic control over the conditions of life.
Build Community-Controlled Financial Infrastructure:
Support alternative finance models, like cooperative banks, solidarity funds, and local currencies, that equip movements with the resources for sustained organizing.