EASPD Innovation Awards: October 2023 Social Innovation
The 2023 edition of EASPD's Innovation Awards focused on social innovation and was linked to our International Conference 2023 on the same topic. The 6 chosen practices promote social innovation in the support services sector.
Choosing this topic stems from a question we have asked ourselves: what does social innovation mean today? Do we use this term as an easy shortcut to categorise any project with social ambitions? Or do we attach certain
values and objectives to such innovation? The lack of a clear definition and meaning of social innovation has hindered the capacity of support services to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD). With our conference, we wish to build a common understanding of what social innovation entails across the disability sector.
Our Innovation Awards serve as an opportunity to discover concrete applications of such innovative processes and practices. We want to learn from European and non-European service providers who have developed new and innovative approaches, the challenges, and opportunities they have encountered, as well as how these can be transferred and made sustainable, available and accessible.
In keeping with these objectives, the practices selected by our jury as winners of the 2023 EASPD Innovation Awards help inspire support services to adopt forward-looking perspectives for the people they support. They show us various examples of how we can work together to provide better, more user-centred services to implement the UN CRPD.