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INNOVATION FOR SOCIETAL CHANGE (PEOPLE)
Start date: Sep 30, 2008, End date: Dec 30, 2012 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The PEOPLE partnership is engaged to explore the opportunities for new employment and ways of reinforcing cohesion and well-being in the context of demographic and societal changes faced by European regions. The nascent trends are the ageing population, new family structures, legal/illegal immigration and the emergence of new vulnerable groups, all of this impacting on the interrelation between people, generations and across countries. The renewed Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs and Cohesion Policy 2007- 2013 is promoting innovation as a possible way of finding appropriate solutions to many of the demographic and societal challenges currently occurring in the EU. Initiatives such as the Regions for Economic Change illustrates that innovation has been acknowledged as a cohesion policy priority by the Member States. The PEOPLE partners are proposing to launch a joint regional PEOPLE Action Plan to deliver innovation on societal change at regional level.The PEOPLE project comprises of a set of regional activities (Communication campaign, International conferences, Study visits, Sub-projects) and will deliver outputs (Transfer of good practices, Policy recommendations, PEOPLE Information System) under six sub-objectives tackled by the PEOPLE mini-programme; 1- Social and e-inclusion. 2- Silver economy. 3- Civil society capacity building. 4- ICT for Health and dependency. 5- Social entrepreneurship. 6- Work-life balance. The proposed Action Plan is linked to the regional strategic planning and will raise awareness on the opportunity for employment, growth in the context of social cohesion amongst regional policy makers and other players of the civil society. The Information Society has clearly the potential to distribute more equally knowledge resources and to offer new job opportunities, also by overcoming the traditional barriers to mobility and geographic distance. PEOPLE will benchmark and support the creation of new schemes andpolicies to promote self-employment and home business start-up, e-health or e-inclusion, social entreprises and other advanced mechanisms to foster local and regional services for social service based companies. Organising work differently, adapting work patterns to new societal demands has a high impact on people's well-being, self-confidence and on the cohesion of society. Developing the adaptability of regions to respond to these societal changes will require new policies, new services, new skills and mechanisms in place to allow change. This will be done better and quicker through the transfer of good practices and all PEOPLE partners are committed to tackle these common societal challenges as demonstrated by their participation in IIIC RFO GROW and project REVOS. PEOPLE mini-programme will provide a framework for developing and sharing innovative tools and methodologies, the identification and transfer of good practices and the best ways of influencing policy makers in this field. Achievements: PEOPLE is a European mini-programme led by the Junta of Andalucia and co-funded under the Interregional Cooperation programme INTERREG IVC. The programme is a €4m collaboration involving seven European regions: Andalucía (Spain), South East England (UK), Venezia (Italy), Noord-Brabant (Netherlands), Malopolska (Poland), Stockholm (Sweden) and Timis (Romania). The aim of PEOPLE is to explore the opportunities for new forms of employment and for improving well-being and cohesion in the frame of the demographic and societal changes. This way, PEOPLE will contribute to reinforce the cohesion and social welfare in the participating regions and find solutions to address some of the consequences of the economic downturn. If the last trimester of 2008 and the first semester of 2009 aimed at defining the thematic priorities over the PEOPLE Sub-objectives and for setting up the Call for Sub-projects, this second semester of 2009 has contributed to spread PEOPLE at regional level. The second semester of 2009 has been first oriented to provide the best conditions for the PEOPLE Sub-projects. There is only one Call in PEOPLE so, establishing a clear and sustainable timing for supporting the regional organisations in applying was a prerequisite. Partnership has therefore concentrate most of its strenght to meet the deadline and to perform a transparent selection procedure for handling the innovation in transregional projects on demographic changes. We are now fairly satisfied of the new regional networks engaged into PEOPLE and enthousiast on the range of activities brought by the Sub-projects. The PEOPLE Call had produced some interesting reflexion through the Handbook which has been studied by many organisation over the 7 regions for starting their partners' search process. 7 Sub-projects covering the 6 PEOPLE thematics were then selected during the SCM in Madrid the 16 November 2009. It supposes the involvement of 26 new public organisations among development agencies, foundations, local government, universities, etc. All of them linked to PEOPLE for the next 18 months. At the same time, PEOPLE has been participating to the AER (Assembly of European Regions) International conference in October 2009 to enhance our visiblility at specialized networks. Further to the conference, PEOPLE has been invited to the Sen@er and ALEC 2010 Conferences for combining PEOPLE with the dissemination of other regional policies (White paper on active ageing in Andalusia and SmartCare programme in Noord-brabant). PEOPLE and the UK partner (SEEDA) organised the International conference on e-Health (Sub-objective nº 2) in Guildford in September 2009. To create synergies, the event was timed to coincide with British Science Festival week and the Launch of the International Centre of Excellence in Telecare (ICE-T) sponsored by SEEDA. The PEOPLE Conference was so clearly supporting the regional policy on e-Healthcare provision for ageing population and benefit for the participation of regional policy makers and stakeholders. 30 experts of the 7 regions could also participate to the study visit conducted by the Kent County Council the day after. Most of the regions worked during this semester on designing their communication strategy further applied in 2010. This strategy comprises the use of a specific Policy Forum Webtool for networking the knowledge around PEOPLE and the use of social networks. All the later will serve the Communication activities in 2010. An extended regional partnership is now running PEOPLE projects and will reinforce the overall capacity for mobilizing contents and expertise over the Sub-objectives. The partnership has been really committed to match the successive deadlines so Sub-projects should all be expected to run for the first trimester of 2010.

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  • 76.4%   2 942 936,00
  • 2007 - 2013 Interreg IVC
  • Project on KEEP Platform
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