During the course of the project, the partners -including EURADA members ACCIO, ART-ER and Scottish Enterprise- worked on enhancing the competitiveness of social enterprises in their respective regions.

The outcomes created by the project are quite impressive. As Roberta Dall’Olio of ART-ER put it: ““Thanks to Eurada and to the RaiSE project we succeeded in networking a lot at the European level and we organised a B2B event in Brussels. Working in RaiSE created spillover effects such as the participation in the ESSI INNOSUP project to analyse in detail the needs of our stakeholders in finance, social impact evaluation, R&I and legal framework; all these aspects are important for co-design partner services.”

Scottish Enterprise, represented by Mrs Gordon from Social Enterprise Network Scotland stressed the importance of the mutual learning aspect of interregional cooperation through Interreg Europe. “The highlight of this project for me was to be able to connect with other people who share the same passion for social enterprises and serving communities.”

Paula Santarén, project lead for ACCIO, stressed that RaiSE allowed the Catalan Government to show and deepen its strong commitment to boosting social and cooperative economy in the region. She illustrated this through the Aracoop Internacional, where ACCIÓ’s Trade & Investment worldwide offices are deployed to personalised consultancy services for social enterprises in order to facilitate their internationalisation process. “Another worthwhile example, it’s in fact a best practice of RaiSE project, are the Ateneus Cooperatius. In these proximity cooperative centres, we provide learning, training, support and facilitate networking for social enterprises in a specific part of our territory. This has generated a lot of interest and resulted in the creation of many new jobs.