Three projects receive Social Innovation Prize

Michel Barnier, acting European Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship, has awarded three European Social Innovation prizes to groundbreaking ideas to create new types of work and address social needs.

The winning projects aim to help disadvantaged women by employing them to create affordable and limited fashion collections, create jobs in the sector of urban farming, and convert abandoned social housing into learning spaces and entrepreneurship labs.

After the success of the first edition in 2013, the European Commission launched a second round of the Social Innovation Competition in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos, a Portuguese computer scientist. Its goal is to invite Europeans to propose new solutions to answer the Job Challenge. The Commission received 1,254 ideas, out of which three were awarded with a prize of €30,000 each.

Barnier said: “We believe that the winning projects can take advantage of unmet social needs and create sustainable jobs. I want these projects to be scaled up and replicated and inspire more social innovations in Europe. We need to tap into this potential to bring innovative solutions to the needs of our citizens and create new types of work.”

The winners were: Italy’s QUID project, which intends to recycle slightly damaged textile into limited collections and provide jobs to disadvantaged women; Belgium’s Urban Farm Lease, which aims to provide training, connection, and consultancy so that unemployed people take advantage of the large surfaces available for agriculture in the city; and Ireland’s Voidstarter, which provides unemployed people with learning opportunities alongside skilled tradespersons in refurbishing ‘voids’, units of social housing which are empty because city councils have insufficient budgets to make them into viable homes.