Thank you for participating in the third online edition of the EU Project-Building Workshop!
On January 31st 2023, Euclid Network (EN) hosted the third online edition of its EU Project-Building Workshop. Joined by over 40 participants from all over Europe, representing social enterprise support organisations and networks working towards a fair and inclusive economy and planet. It’s no news that accessing EU funding presents one of the biggest challenges to the social enterprise sector. EN wants to change this by supporting its members and wider network for a series of services: regular EU funding webinars, bootcamps as well as personalised support for our members, through our EU Funding Toolkit and the annual EU Project-Building Workshop. The latter, enables participants to expand their skills and knowledge in EU funding and policy, connect with changemakers and experts from across Europe and build new projects. This year we were joined by experts in project development, available EU funding, proposal evaluation and. what’s next? Exactly, measuring the impact projects!
The first session of the day matched participants and their organisations with a similar strategic focus over the coming years, enabling you to connect deeper and explore possibilities of a future joint project and develop an initial project overview around the themes of 1) Circular Economy; 2) Social Procurement; 3) Youth; 4) Gender Equality.
‘We need to think about systemic ways to create sustainable funding for social
enterprises…for example through granting infrastructure which can be used to
generate long term incomes’ – Per Bach, Sociale Entreprenører i Danmark
To unpack current social enterprise policy initiatives and EU funding programmes for social enterprise support organisations and social innovation in general, and those that might fit to the developed project ideas in the first session, we were joined by speakers from the European Commission and InvestEU. Jointly we learned more about the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), the Single Market Programme, Horizon Europe, Erasmus+, the Social Economy Gateway and the Transition Pathway, as well as what InvestEU has in stock for social entrepreneurship.
But how to move from project ideation and available funding streams to a successful project proposal? This was the key topic of the third session of the day, which invited participants to invert the lens to learn from their unsuccessful proposals in the past. Starting from the sections where participants previously lost points, we explored concrete steps of how to develop a successful proposal that, amongst others, has a clear Theory of Change and European added value.
‘Social impact thinking enhances social innovation’ – Dr. Gonca Ongan
The last session closed the day by diving into impact measurement and communicating the impact that social enterprise support organisations and their projects and members create every day. The speakers provided plenty of guidance, case studies and ideas of how to go about introducing impact measurement and why organisations need to start from the impact they want to make and work backwards.
We thank everyone for joining EN’s annual EU Project Building Workshop and hope you connected with changemakers across Europe, expanded your skills and knowledge on EU project application and impact measurement and communication and learned about EU funding programmes and initiatives that are here to pave the way for a thriving social enterprise sector. We already saw that one future Erasmus+ project will be developed among the workshop participants and are looking forward to many more developing!
Special thanks to our partners European Commission and RREUSE for their support and to EN Team for making this event possible.
