The Erasmus+ project ‘Devisus’ is short for “Development of an Ecosystem for Valuing Social Impact and Social Utility”. By exchanging practices, knowledge, experiences, skills and resources, Devisus created a common ground to evaluate social impact and social utility in the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE). In striving to construct a shared vision to the question of social scope evaluation, the project sheds light onto, and promotes the values of the social economy organisations and enterprises; and those working in the field.
For many years now, the issue of social impact and utility assessment has been a key issue in the social economy. However, despite the emergence of projects and experiments on the subject, there is no real shared vision at the European level (beyond the more classic and quantified vision of impact assessment).
Seven organisations, most of them members of RIPESS Europe (European network of solidarity economy), have decided to work on the co-construction of a shared vision on impact measurement, by pooling their experiences and lessons learned. This is how the DEVISUS project “Development of an Ecosystem for Valuing Social Impact and Social Utility” was born. The project is financed under the ERASMUS+ programme “Adult Education Small-scale Partnerships”.
Through the exchanges of practices, knowledge, experiences, skills and resources, the project aimed to:
build a shared culture between partners, in order to develop benchmarks and guidelines that can be disseminated throughout Europe
improve the skills of coaches, teachers and trainers working in the field of SSE
strengthen alliances within SSE between different networks to promote the expertise of SSE networks on the issue of social impact and utility.
This collaborative work allowed, at the end of the project, to prefigure a follow-up project, on the elaboration and dissemination of training courses on social impact and utility assessment across Europe.
Project planning
The project ran from April 2022 to September 2023, and is built on 5 axes, leading to 5 meeting times between partners:
April 2022 in Paris: overall organisation of the consortium and definition of the overall schedule, deliverables.
September 2022 in Lille: work on a shared culture, sharing of experiences of the different partners, interventions of researchers.
October 2022 in Rome: work on the skills and know-how needed to support organisations in their social impact assessment.
February 2023 in Namur: development of a training framework for social impact coaches.
June 2023 in Brussels: dissemination of results and closure of the project.
This project gathers 7 partners:
MES-Mouvement pour l’économie solidaire, lead coordinator [FR]
MES Occitanie – Mouvement pour l’économie solidaire Occitanie [FR]
UNIPSO [BE]
Concertes [BE]
RIPESS Europe [EU]
And 2 supporting organisations:
Initiatives Europe Conseil, to accompany the monitoring of the project and the overall evaluation process [EU]
Lifelong Learning Platform, to support the dissemination of project products, deliverables, results [EU].