- Who is UpSocial?
UpSocial is an organisation focused on contribute to solve critical social challenges through innovation. We facilitate demand-driven processes aimed to respond to the need of finding more effective, efficient and fair solutions to social challenges. Inspired by successful innovations from around the world, we design powerful, realistic and scalable projects to resolve social challenges.
- What is Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion (ACSI)?
A project aimed at catalysing the transfer of successful innovations among European cities. The approach of ACSI helps cities to start innovating by adapting and adopting evidence-based innovations that successfully respond to the social challenges they are facing. ACSI is a project implemented by UpSocial in collaboration with five partner cities and EUROCITIES, with the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and “la Caixa” Foundation.
Through the ACSI project, the cities of Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Stockholm work together to find three shared social challenges:
— How to generate opportunities for the long-term unemployed?
— How to maximise opportunities for children at risk of exclusion?
— How to build better employment opportunities and pathways for young people?
— ACSI: how it works?- Why some innovations have a Toolkit available?
The process of identifying and selecting innovative solutions to a social challenge increases the knowledge on the models and how they work. Innovators leading initiatives that have been selected to explore local implementation in other contexts within the frame of a given project, such as ACSI, have been engaged in the process. In those cases, Toolkits sistematise the learnings generated on first steps to transfer these social innovations from one place to another.
— Use the searcher to find innovations by SDG, collections or name, with Toolkit available.
- Could I have a customised collection of solutions addressing a social challenge?
UpSocial helps cities and other key actors from public, private or social sector, to define social challenges requiring innovative solutions based on demands. We design projects where this demand of innovation is responded by identifying evidence-based initiatives from all around the world that can be adapted and adopted to solve social challenges in other local contexts. If you or your organisation are interested on finding a collection of new solutions to a pressing social need, please contact us. Let’s do a collection together!
- What are the UpSocial standards?
UpSocial uses five standards to analyse and to standardise information in order to achieve a better understanding of innovations. They respond to five dimensions of social innovations: strength of the evidence, innovation type, adaptation experience, transfer model and income-generating model. In this website, you will find open information about the strength of the evidence and its sources on each innovation. You have to register or login to find more information about type of innovation and adaptation experience. You will find transfer model and income-generating model analysis in Toolkits, when available. We invite you to download the full document explaining the standards and its references, as well as to give us your feedback by contacting us.
