- Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion is an initiative seeking to implement more effective and more efficient solutions to solve social challenges.
- The five participant cities -Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Stockholm- have agreed three social problems to address: Children at Risk of Exclusion, Youth Unemployment and Long-term Unemployment.
- The initiative launches a Call for Proven Innovations that respond successfully to these common challenges and generate social inclusion.
The need of finding more effective and efficient, but also more sustainable and scalable solutions to address social problems has become a priority in the social agenda of many cities. At the same time, many of these solutions already exist, but they remain unknown.
Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion ACSI is a project that seeks to respond to these needs with a demand-driven process. It starts analysing the problems at the city level. Then it looks for the best innovations that could be adapted and implemented by the participant cities to respond to their social problems.
Through this initiative, Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Stockholm join efforts to address the following three common challenges:
- How to maximise opportunities for children at risk of exclusion?
- How to build better employment opportunities and pathways to young people?
- How to generate opportunities for the long-term unemployed?
The Call for Proven Innovations to these problems is open until November 30th 2016. We invite cities, NGOs, the private sector or any hybrid organisation to submit successful responses to these challenges. The search for innovations focuses on those with a strong evidence of impact and a sustainable model that could be adapted and scaled up.
A selection of 20 innovations per challenge will be presented to a jury of local experts in every city. The local juries will select 3 to 9 innovations they would like to implement. The process also allows every city to adapt and adopt them in order to prevent the risk of exclusion and generate better employment opportunities.
ACSI is a 3-years project seeking to facilitate the scaling of social innovations to resolve social challenges, capturing and sharing the knowledge on how to transfer social innovations from one place to another.
