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InnoSocial project closing ceremony

On 4 April 2025, a conference summarising the implementation of the InnoSocial project was held at the headquarters of the Social Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. For more than two and a half years, experts from universities and educational institutions from Poland, Italy, Lithuania and Bulgaria developed an international course on II&SE - inclusive innovation and social entrepreneurship. The project was co-financed by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme.

‘Inclusion-oriented social entrepreneurship is an important and still underestimated element in the economic cycle. Students should be aware of the benefits it brings in a financial but especially in a social sense’ said during the final conference Aleksandra Zając, Project Manager. The meeting was not only a ceremonial summary of the cooperation carried out so far, but also a presentation of the developed results. It was attended by university lecturers, students, trainers, representatives of employers and NGOs, as well as project partners. By the end of April, meetings presenting the achievements of the project team were also held at the University of Pavia, Vilniaus Kolegija in Lithuania, Tetra Solutions in Sofia and the Lublin-based InCREA Foundation.

The developed InnoSocial learning package consists mainly of teaching materials and the syllabus of the 75-hour course, as well as the Syllabus for the trainers specifying the workload of the course, its structure, learning outcomes, methods of implementation and evaluation rules. ‘The package has been developed in a comprehensive way, allowing it to be easily adapted in a university context and even to be tailored to other training institutions‘ own educational needs’ said Evgenia Nikulina a representative of Bulgarian partner Tetra Solutions. This is mainly possible thanks to the ‘InnoSocial Toolkit’, included in the InnoSocial package, which is used to design and deliver training courses on inclusive innovation and social entrepreneurship. It provides guidelines for adapting the developed course to the requirements of the implementation environment and the needs of the target groups.

The project, which has been running since November 2022, involved stakeholders from at least four countries at different stages of the development of the results. 70 people participated in the panel discussions, nearly 40 people participated in the Train the trainer workshops and almost 90 students participated in the pilot implementation of the course. Training courses using InnoSocial materials were also delivered by trainers from the inCREA foundation in the project ‘Yesterday excluded, today active’, in which 100 people improved their social competences in order to improve their situation on the labour market and retrain.

InnoSocial training materials are available free of charge and anyone wishing to use them in their current educational work can access them via https://www.innosocial.eu/ or by contacting one of the Project Partners.