CO-RESP – Community Resilience Through Social Procurement

CO-RESP aims to help direct the local economy to create new jobs for persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.

Public procurement is a mechanism of significant economic importance that accounted for around 14% of the European Union’s GDP in 2017 and can contribute to transforming local economies into more sustainable and socially inclusive by stimulating the creation of job opportunities for disadvantaged groups.

In this context, the CO-RESP project funded by Single Market Programme (SMP COSME), aims to help the local economy – through the use of ‘Socially Responsible Public Procurement’ (SRPP) – to create new jobs for persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups by coordinating the exchange of good practices and enhance the inter-regional collaboration between social economy actors and regional/local authorities at the European level.

Objectives

CO-RESP aims to achieve four primary objectives:

To build the capacity of local and regional authorities in designing and implementing SRPP to address the needs of local communities and enhance their social and economic resilience & to improve business environment for social economy;
To actively collect and circulate good practice cases to maximise the use of SRPP and to increase the employment rate of persons with disabilities & other vulnerable groups, promote positive social impact, community resilience, employment opportunities, decent work, social inclusion, accessibility, compliance with social and labour rights for persons with disabilities both within and outside the partnership;
To raise awareness on the positive impact of SRPP at the local level, specifically in times of crisis;
To set up a mutual learning network & to create synergies among different stakeholders: local authorities, Social Economy organisations, businesses, local communities, Persons with Disabilities, other vulnerable groups, etc.

Events

CO-RESP Conference: Social Economy Mission

Project materials

Partners

Led by EASPD, the CO-RESP consortium is made up of 7 partners who are spread across different countries, forming a multidisciplinary consortium, which includes cities in Austria, Bulgaria and Spain.