Following the participation in the call for proposal of last November, the City of Torino and the Chamber of Commerce were awarded the RESPONDET project, within the framework of the European call COSME – Social Economy Mission. They will bring the experience of Torino Social Impact.

RESPONDET “Regional Social Economy Policies For Sustainable Community-Driven Environmental Transition” aims to increase the resilience of local communities and their ability to cope with and overcome crises.

For this project, the City of Turin and the Chamber of Commerce have joined forces to bring the Torino Social Impact territorial ecosystem into an international network. The lead partner of RESPONDET is REVES aisbl – Réseau Européen des Villes & Régions de l’Economie Sociale; the other partners involved are the Catalonia region and Coopcat (ES), Region Västra Götaland and Coompanion (SE), Wallonia Region and CONCERTES (BE), Regional Centre of Social Policy/Malopolska region (PL).

“An intense work of relations at European level has been initiated to both position and promote Torino Social Impact within the most relevant EU processes for the development of the social economy, in particular the elaboration of the European Action Plan for the Social Economy, and to build relationships with similar experiences and favour the exchange of practices and the visibility of Torino in other ecosystems – points out Dario Gallina, President of the Torino Chamber of Commerce -. Participation in European projects plays a decisive role in this process”.

“In recent years, thanks to an increasingly collaborative and attentive local ecosystem, Torino has made social innovation its distinctive feature, with the aim of making its territory a place where social impact enterprises and investors can find the best conditions to operate and develop,” explains Chiara Foglietta, Councillor for Ecological and Digital Transition and Innovation.

In addition to facilitating policy convergence and effective knowledge transfer, RESPONDET aims to facilitate the building of local and transnational partnerships to ensure the sustainability of project results.

How? By accompanying the Third Sector realities towards a Green transition process, with the implementation of ‘capacity building’ in the construction of an Action Plan aimed at providing them with the tools to be able to act in this direction and change.

The aim is to strengthen the role of the social economy as a mobilisation tool for the development and consolidation of local communities in general.

There is a need to develop strategies and support policies that will lead to a greener and faster improvement of the economic situation. In order to do this, it is necessary to encourage the transition towards a more sustainable and digitalised economic machine by means of a synergic intervention at a transnational level that enables the sharing of experiences and know-how with other local and regional realities and the assessment of the repeatability of the solutions tested.

Therefore, depending on the different local contexts, different responses will have to be developed that place each city/region at different levels of development. In return, the mutual dissemination and joint construction and sharing of solutions among the project partners will allow the creation of a common legacy that will be translated into a regional action plan.

RESPONDET will therefore facilitate the convergence of policy lines and effective knowledge transfer, but also the building of local and transnational partnerships that will ensure the sustainability of the project results.