Article by DEVISUS
Context and objectives of the project
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”.
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.
The partnership
This project brings together 7 partners:
- Mouvement pour l’économie solidaire, administrative leader (France)
- ADEPES-Mouvement pour l’économie solidaire Occitanie (France)
- Apes-Acteurs pour une Economie Solidaire (France)
- RIES-Rete Italiana per l’Economia Solidale (Italy)
- UNIPSO (Belgium)
- Concertes(Belgium)
- RIPESS Europe
and 2 support organisations:
- Initiative Europe Conseil, to accompany the monitoring of the project and the global evaluation process.
- Lifelong Learning Platform, to support the dissemination of the products, deliverables and results of the project .
Project timeline
The project runs from April 2022 to October 2023, and 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 .
