Integrating Refugees in Society and Labour Market through Social Innovation
The challenge that SIforREF addresses is combating the risk of marginalization of refugees after the reception phases (which are different in the various central European Countries) . SIforREF’s main objective is to enhance significantly and/or to launch (where not existing at all) refugee integration policies at regional and local level (in the 4 involved regions), particularly addressing refugees’ transition from reception phases to autonomy. The change that SIforREF intends to produce is the following: we expect  that refugee integration is included in the decisional agenda both at local and transnational level. Moreover, we expect that thorugh this project policy-makers and stakeholders engage in virtuous governance in order that innovative and inclusive measures become mainstream. The main outputs of the projects are: tools for evaluating and designing social innovative practices and improving the social innovation capacity of policies; pilots of these tools (7) and a regional and transnational strategy. As for the approach, SIforREF is based on the idea that best practices related to refugee’s integration can be found both in countries more experienced in tackling with refugees -or where policy makers explicitly put in their agenda refugees’ mid- term integration- and in countries less experienced or where national governments are more hostile. The complexity of this issue require a mutual learning among central European regions, especially neighborhood regions like those involved in the project.
SIforREF conveys innovation because it tackles an issue (refugee integration) which is poorley addressed by official policies, despite attacched problems are evident, and because it aims not only at  exchanging good practices, but  intends to jointly design and implement methodologies for integrating refugees that draw from the social innovation approach.