The Euroclusters partnerships are intended to launch a new network of cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary and trans-European strategic initiatives aimed at strengthening Europe’s resilience by connecting actors across countries, sectors and industrial ecosystems. To this end, they will be running calls to provide financial support to SMEs. The ECCP team spoke to Francesca Menozzi of the SocialTech4EU – SocialTech for Europe for Resilient and Responsible Ecosystems Euroclusters project about the SocialTech4EU open call, goals, intentions and the opportunities they are presenting to the European cluster community.

Francesca Menozzi is a project manager for the Innovation and Social Justice areas of the Giacomo Brodolini Foundation. She has many years of experience, gained in various countries, in drafting and managing projects and programs concerning youth, education and training, social inclusion and migration, funded by the European Commission, other international donors, foundations and local authorities, regional public authorities and national. Most recently, she worked for the UNESCO Program to Support Researchers and Scientists from Developing Countries, and for a project targeting displaced students and refugees.

Francesca introduced the objectives of the project as “to strengthen the resilience and innovation capacity, competitiveness, and sustainability of social economy ecosystems, start-ups and SMEs of the social economy”. As such, the project aims to represent the largest support and capacity-building programme in Europe for social enterprises.

The recently published call actions these goals, aiming to contribute to the up-skilling and re-skilling of social enterprises (and their workforce) across Europe, in relation to business, digitalisation, and innovation/tech management.

Social enterprises awarded in this call will participate in the first of the three phases of the project (Training) and thus they will be able to apply for further financial support within the other project phases/calls:

• Innovation: up to 20.000 Euros for each selected organisation (up to 20).
• Acceleration: up to 35.000 Euros for each selected organisation (up to 10).

The Call for Social Enterprises in Europe – Financial support for training will provide selected organisations with a financial contribution of €3.000 for purchasing services related to training in ICT, emerging technologies for the social economy, open innovation, business administration, marketing and sales.

For details and more information, please visit the call page.

Cluster organisationSocialTech for Europe for Resilient and Responsible Ecosystems