The European project Buy Social

Buy Social picks up the legacy of the Social Procurement project, which aimed to promote innovative forms of delivery in the local area, in the public and private systems, in order to support the growth of social impact businesses and activities, taking it to a European level: in each partner country, a social economy federation or support structure will carry out activities to raise awareness and disseminate good practices from all EU countries identified in the project. It kicked off in May 2023, with a duration of 18 months, and is funded by the European Innovation Council and the Executive Agency for SMEs (EISMEA) under call SMP-COSME-2022-BUYSOCIALB2BMARKET.

As part of the project, a campaign has been launched that also includes an experimental portal to locate social impact enterprises, currently dedicated to the circular economy sector, which will soon be expanded. On the portal, you can find various social entrepreneurship entities, such as cooperatives and social enterprises, benefit corporations, and innovative startups with a social mission. You can filter them based on the service or product offered, the type of enterprise, and the predominant social mission.

Visit the portal at this link

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Social Procurement, the Responsible Choice for Businesses

From the collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce of Turin, Torino Social Impact, Unione Industriali Torino, and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, an online series of meetings was born to delve into the topic of social procurement, promoting responsible choices for businesses.

The meetings aim to explore the main aspects of this business strategy, examining both the elements of greatest interest for business development (supply side) and the main opportunities for market entry (demand side), which, in addition to meeting the needs of businesses, generate positive impacts on the territory.

The online series of meetings began on June 5th (How to integrate business demand) and continued on July 3rd (How to integrate business strategy), with a final session on September 24th (Promoting the social market).

This activity is part of the Turin Capital of Business Culture 2024 calendar and is carried out within the framework of Buy Social.

The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol history – experimentation with forms of social procurement at the local level

In the last half of 2021, a survey on social impact purchasing in Piedmont had been conducted, involving both the social enterprise and private worlds. It emerged that there was widespread interest in the private world on the topic of social impact procurement and in general on the topic of collaboration with the world of social enterprise, accompanied, however, by a lack of knowledge of this world and prejudices about its ability to compete in the market.

Therefore, the proposal was born to build a joint protocol to foster social procurement through communication and awareness plans and by taking advantage of the large number of members of the Torino Social Impact platform to activate and multiply concrete actions. The goal is to make Torino Social Impact a national and international model of social procurement.

The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol is a call aimed at partners who can test themselves by engaging on a very concrete issue for the development of the impact economy by joining and guaranteeing their commitment on actions such as: social procurement; capacity building aimed at the third sector; collaborative B2B or other forms of collaboration; and integration of impact in their business documents. The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol is available at the link, to join simply fill out the form indicating the commitments the organization intends to pursue.