Senior Social
Entrepreneuring - Building capacity among seniors to
serve as social change brokers in communities
Erasmus
+
24 months: 2016-2018
Coordinator: Arhus Kommune (Denmark)
Partners:
Association
Pistes Solidaires (France)
Association E-Seniors (France)
Association Generations (Bulgaria)
University of Chester (United Kingdom)
COCIS – Camara oficial de comercio e industria de Sabadell (Spain)
INRCA – Instituto nazionale di riposo e cura per
anziani (Italy)
Working with Europe (Spain)
The project objective is to mobilise teams of seniors in participating
project communities and beyond to build capacity among them to serve as SOCIAL
CHANGE BROKERS in these communities, spotting social change needs, bringing
together relevant stakeholders and citizens and facilitate or drive the social
change process. During 24 months of the project, it will strive to exploit the
social change processes to sustain their activity through creating appropriate
organisational frameworks, be it as volunteers, association members, employees,
consultants or social service providers.
The project brings together 3 top priorities in
Europe 2020 policy:
1.
The need to retain or re-engage the increasing
number of European seniors as active social and economic contributors
2.
The need to bring about social innovation as an
alternative to traditional public services
3.
The need to promote entrepreneurial mind-sets
and initiative-taking in the communities
The role of the senior social change brokers is
not necessarily to take social change initiatives through long and often
complicated processes and to for example systemic levels, but rather to:
-
Spot and identify social change needs in the
community not well addressed by the market or by increasingly scarce public
services
-
Include citizens in the first phases of defining
the social needs and how to bring about innovative solutions, based on existing
or available resources
-
Bring together relevant and new cross-sector stakeholders
for joint dialogues on the identified social needs and how innovative solutions
can be created
-
Co-drive the creation of joint forces projects
between stakeholders and citizens to initiate the change process
The senior social change brokers will at the
same time serve as role-models and mentors for other seniors and as pioneers of
entrepreneurial mentality in the community. This means that they also need to
build capacity to create relevant infrastructures to sustain their initiatives,
and in some cases to generate economy for themselves.
Such infrastructures or organisational forms
could be: volunteering, linking to or joining an existing association or
organisation, creating part time or full time employment, freelance
consultancy, creating funded projects, establishing a social enterprise,
offering various forms of services based on user payment
The ultimate mission of the project is to create
and share well-tested models of senior social entrepreneuring
that can be useful to seniors and communities across Europe and generate social
and economic value, including first steps to link together senior social brokers
in supportive networks at European level.