DEVISUS

For many years now, the issue of social impact/utility assessment has been a key issue in the social economy. However, despite the emergence of projects and experiments on the subject, there is no real common vision on a European scale (beyond the more classic and quantified vision of evaluation).

Seven organisations, most of them members of RIPESS Europe (European network of solidarity economy), wanted to work on the co-construction of a shared vision, by pooling their experiences and lessons learned on the subject. This is how the DEVISUS project (Development of an Ecosystem for Valuing Social Impact and Social Utility) came into being, financed under the ERASMUS + programme “Simplified Adult Education Partnerships”.

Duration of the project: April 2022 – October 2023

• Trainers and VET providers
• SSE organisations
• Policy/decision makers
• VET trainees

Through a series of exchanges of practices, knowledge, experiences, skills and resources, the project aims to

• build a shared culture between partners, in order to develop benchmarks and guidelines that can be disseminated throughout Europe ;
• improve the skills of teachers and trainers working in the field of SSE
• strengthen alliances within SSE between different networks to promote the expertise of SSE networks on the issue of social impact and social utility.

The construction of this common corpus should allow, at the end of the project, to prefigure a second project, on the elaboration and dissemination of training courses on social impact/utility assessment across Europe.

Our ambition is to co-build between partners of this project a shared culture of social utility/social impact assessment, to acquire a common knowledge base, to cross experiences and to work on a common vocabulary and a shared vision of the challenges of the assessment of utility and social impact (UIS) on a European scale.

In this context, we have built a learning community of networks of actors interested in the question of the transmission of knowledge, know-how and tools to assess the utility and social impact of ESS organizations and produced at the end of our second Mobility/activity 2: a capitalization document, a shared document on common orientations, completed by a glossary.

Project timeline 
The project is built on 5 axes, leading to 5 meeting times between partners:

– April 2022 in Paris: overall organisation of the consortium and definition of the overall schedule, deliverables, etc. ;
– September 2022 in Lille: work on a common culture, sharing of experiences of the different partners, interventions of researchers ;
– October 2022 in Rome: work on the skills and know-how needed to accompany social impact assessment ;
– February 2023 in Namur: development of a training framework for the profession of accompanier ;
– May 2023 in Brussels: dissemination of results and closure of the project .

Project information press here

and 2 support organizations: