“Μια κοινωνική οικονομία για μια κοινωνική Ευρώπη”

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to write to you, so soon after the conclusion of our conference ‘Social Economy as an effective model for Social Inclusion’ held in Varna, Bulgaria.

The demand for conference places and the quality of the exchanges and dialogue that took place, together demonstrated just how topical and relevant the conference theme was. As one of the speakers commented, there is a yearning in many of our countries to ‘make Europe social.’ Certainly, for those of our members working within the European Union, despite the continuing trauma of how to address migration, there seems to be an increasing recognition that Europe must have a tangible social element to satisfy us, its citizens.

A strong and developing social economy is key to creating a social Europe and I thank the speakers and delegates for making the conference so rich an experience. As delegates we had opportunities to identify and discuss examples of best practice, to examine the sort of legislative frameworks that we need in our countries to allow social enterprises to blossom and gained ideas about how to fund social enterprises.

Alongside the conference we held our General Assembly and organisational meetings where we shared exciting ideas that will increase member input and influence in EASPD. More information about these plans can be found in our ‘Commit!’ Strategy and elsewhere in this newsletter and our website.

Several delegates have already commented on how much they enjoyed their time in Varna. We shall read the evaluations with interest. We greatly appreciated the decision of the Bulgarian government to select our conference as part of the programme of the Bulgarian Presidency of the EU. We welcomed the contributions to our proceedings made by the Minister for labour and social policies, Mr Petkov, the Deputy Minister and other parliamentary representatives.

I must conclude with special thanks to Georgi Georgiev and the NASO team. We have valued our collaboration with them for many years and working with the EASPD team of Franz Wolfmayr and Sonia Staskowiak, they produced a wonderful conference.

Everything worked perfectly, and our Bulgarian hosts gave us a typically warm welcome.

J. Crowe
President”

Πηγή:
http://easpd.eu/en/content/social-economy-social-europe-editorial#