INNOVATION FOR SOCIETAL CHANGE
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 and
policies 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.