What do Belo Horizonte, Bilbao, Dublin, Guadalajara, Montreal, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Turin and Warsaw have in common, apart from being great cities to live in?
They have all been selected to be part of the project Respond, Rebuild, Reinvent (RRR) implemented under the OECD’s auspices and funded by the European Union’s Foreign Partnership Instrument.
The RRR project explores how social and solidarity economy (SSE) ecosystems can play a critical role in supporting local authorities to respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. Thus, it is aimed at raising awareness and capacity to build conducive national and local ecosystems for SSE development, and promote knowledge sharing and peer exchanges at the international level.
Throughout the selection process the cities showcased some of their policies, programs, and activities to enhance the SSE ecosystems and promote collaboration with diverse stakeholders. Questions regarding the existing infrastructure to improve cross-sectoral collaboration, the main social challenges addressed through social economy in the cities, as well as the most important challenges related to COVID-19 and how these had been addressed by the cities were asked.
For the nine selected cities, the work will start as of this month!
With the support of a team of 16 recognised expert partners led by Upsocial and Ashoka, they will be guided through a process of:
- Deepening their understanding of SSE ecosystems.
- Defining challenges to be tackled in a cross-sectoral, collaborative approach.
- Exploring solutions and social innovations
- Experimenting on how to adopt these solutions.
After defining common challenges, the cities will be split into two groups to work together through a peer-learning methodology. The outcomes of this short and intense project, which ends by October 2021, will then feed into the OECD Global Action “Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems”.
Stay tuned for more!