Goodbye Phase 1!
The last BRESE interregional meeting of phase 1 took place in Zadar, Croatia.
Currently, we are facing a number of societal challenges, such as climate change, the pollution of our oceans, demographic change and, very acutely, the COVID-pandemic. However, instead of tackling these challenges sustainably at their core cause, we often only tackle the symptoms. Facing these challenges, we need to rethink our approaches in order to bring about long-term change and to make a sustainable positive impact.
Social Entrepreneurs want to facilitate exactly this sustainable change and tackle nowadays` challenges with innovative and future-oriented solutions. Managed in a transparent and democratic manner, social enterprises combine an entrepreneurial spirit with achieving wider social, environmental or community objectives. Especially for European (border) regions, social enterprises bear an enormous potential.
Despite this great potential of social enterprises, however, it is still difficult for them to find suitable funding, support and investments schemes. Measuring their profits not only by a financial aspect but also by an impact aspect, it is often difficult for them to compete with "traditional" enterprises when it comes to investments and loans. Moreover, the landscape of available business support facilities, tailored legal forms for social enterprises and their political recognition is very fragmented among European countries.
Making use of existing differences in European regions, the BRESE project aims to exchange experiences and best practices with their partners from different European regions. This will help the regions to improve existing policy instruments and support schemes with regard to social enterprises.
Based on the findings of the project, an action plan will be drawn up for each region at the end of the project, containing concrete recommendations for regional policy makers on how regional funding instruments can be made more effective to support social enterprises more adequately and sustainably
€1,214,160.00
SME competitiveness
The INTERREG V A-programme Germany-Netherlands has become the main policy instrument for CBC between the two countries. Approved by the Commission 2014 as the first CBC-programme in Europe, the INTERREG V programme focuses on economic development invovling SME (65% of the budget).
At the DE-NL border, the CBC INTERREG–programme has a 25-year long tradition. Having mainly focused on strengthening economic growth and innovation, there is a groundswell of opinion among relevant policy makers in the region working with the CBC programme that also social enterprises and their potential to tackle the challenges of the border region should receive greater attention.
Regardless of the undeniable societal need for social enterprises and their proven ability to foster inclusive growth and social cohesion, they have not received any attention within previous INTERREG A programmes. Although SME funding is available within the INTERREG A Germany-Netherlands programme, social enterprises cannot reach these schemes in practice and their particular needs are not paid attention to. Having now become aware of the importance of social enterprises, their potential and their need for tailored policy instruments, the ERW and its local stakeholders are seeking an integrated approach and new measures that can foster social enterprises, raise awareness and ultimately, be implemented in the programme. Best practices from other European regions can be used to improve the programme in the future.
Main objective of the Priority axis 4. is to enhance institutional infrastructure and services in order to accelerate the competitiveness and development of business environment in the programme area. The Programme focuses on providing the opportunity to strengthen business support sector by supporting cooperation and further development. In that respect, the Programme support creation and networking of business support organizations and clusters, increase in the range of their activities as regards to the use of innovation, new technologies and ICT solutions.
Creating supportive environment for social entrepreneurship by extending the scope and level of services of above mentioned organizations would contribute to decreasing regional disparities, combating poverty, increasing employment, creating new products and services and increasing competitiveness of the enterprises in the programme area. Improving policy instrument would address unique specificities and needs of the emerging social entrepreneurship sector in the programme area.
The programme is developed by both countries (LV and LT) aiming to contribute to the sustainable and cohesive socio-economic development of the Programme region.
This is done through the four priority areas:
(i) Sustainable and clean environment
(ii) Support to labour mobility and employment – a
(iii) Social inclusion as a precondition of territorial development with two specific objectives –
(iv) Improved quality of living through efficient public services and administration with one specific objective
The programme is implemented in a period of several years in a real-life environment. The successful implementation inevitably demands the assessment and improvement of existing measures in order to tackle the programme's problematics in a more result-oriented manner. This goes hand in hand with identifying successful measures which could be continued or extended in the post 2020 period.
One of Programme’s current priority fields is social inclusion and as figures of persons living at risk of poverty or social exclusion in both countries have remained relatively high it is necessary to evaluate the existing measures and find new ways of tackling the issue. Since social entreprises present an innovative way to both stimulate economic development and promote social inclusion, they offer great potential for the region which has been unused in the past. Thus, the region will benefit from interregional cooperation and they experience of other regions in this matter.
The Strategy of the Operational Programme Human Resources (the “OP HR”) is based on the National Reform Programme of the Slovak Republic which defines measures strengthening economic growth and employment in the Slovak Republic. One of the main challenges for the sustainable economic growth in Slovakia is high level of long-term unemployment and social inclusion of marginalized groups. Therefore, the strong focus of OP HR is paid on the measures increasing the employment rate of marginalized group and implementation of the measures improving the social inclusion of excluded groups, with the main focus on the people from marginalized Roma communities. As such measure is considered also social entrepreneurship and support of work integration social enterprises, which attracts the strong interest of policy makers same as politicians. Activities supporting establishment of new social enterprises and operation of already existing social enterprises are considered to be eligible under 4 investment priorities of OP HR. Despite the recent focus on the social entrepreneurship related activities, the social entrepreneurship is still new phenomena within the priorities of the financial schemes and OP HR as such. Finetuning of the adequate and tailored supporting schemes combining refundable and non-refundable financial assistance effectively promoting social entrepreneurship in Slovakia is a challenge, which meant to be addressed by this project.
Under the Priority 8 of the Podkarpackie Region Operational Programme 2014- 2020, the policy instrument tackles Promoting social entrepreneurship and vocational integration in social enterprises and social economy and solidarity in order to facilitate access to employment is addressed. The specific objective of the policy instrument is to strengthen the role of social economy entities in the activation of disadvantaged people and in providing social services of general interest in the region. Until 2020, it is expected that the number of jobs created in social enterprises will increase from 377 (2013) to 1079. Similarly, the number of jobs existing for at least 30 months, created in social enterprises will be increased by 25 per cent. Currently, the main bottleneck of running policy initiatives at regional level is the lack of coordination that leads to activities being carried out by municipalities, districts or provinces solely, but without exploiting synergies. Improvements will be primarily addressed to not only increase the number of social enterprises that generate jobs for people who have experienced social exclusion, but to also foster their competitiveness on the market, while pursuing a social mission by 2020. Moreover, an improvement of the assessment of the efficient allocation of resources is needed.
The last BRESE interregional meeting of phase 1 took place in Zadar, Croatia.
Did you know that 59% of businesses prioritised social issues during the pandemic and 62% are now focusing on Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) targets?
"What's new in the support of social entrepreneurship in Slovakia?" was the topic of the 6th regional stakeholders meeting in Slovakia.
On 30 March 2022, after more than 2 years, the project partners and regional stakeholders finally had the opportunity to meet in person in Bratislava, Slovakia.
What is the state of play of social entrepreneurship in the BRESE partner regions? In out in the BRESE Joint Analysis.
The BRESE partner Slovak Business Agency brought together their local stakeholders online for the first time in 2021.
First BRESE online interregional meeting organised by Rzeszow Regional Development Agency
On 22 January 2020, the "International Workshop on the challenges and good practices of SMEs in V4 countries" took place at the Slovak Business Agency.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development in Latvia organized their first Local Stakeholder meeting.
Great interest for BRESE Project at first local Stakeholder Meeting organised by the Slovak Business Agency