KISS A Guide of Sustainable practices

In most countries of the European Union, Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is seen as an alternative response to the financial crisis, rising unemployment and social inequality.

In some, it has become synonymous with citizens and civil society (sometimes even local and national governments) acting to influence their environment and promote social transformation.

When in 2014 we started this journey, promoting ISSE Community works!, an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership, we realized that the term SSE has a broad meaning and includes many Social and Solidarity Economy initiatives, within which are a wide variety of practices and structures from, NGO’s to social cooperatives.

With ISSE we ‘took a picture’ of the state of the art and focused on competences and tools to develop them. You are welcome to make use of the Research, the Portfolio of competences, the Training Manual and the ISSE game (you can find these intellectual products in other languages on the project web).

During the 2 years development of ISSE, we realized that we should focus more on the strategies to strengthen the sustainability of SSE initiatives.

One of the major challenges faced by associations, cooperatives and other initiatives of the SSE, as well as those young social entrepreneurs, is to ensure sustainability to their initiatives. The lack of sustainability - economic, but also social, environmental, of labour conditions and political - makes them more vulnerable, in terms of developing a coherent eco-political project.

For this reason, with a partnership enriched by new comers from the educational and the public sector, we decided to promote a new Strategic Partnership project: ‘KISS: the Key Is Social Sustainability’. KISS is the experiment of 9 partners from 4 countries (France, Italy, Greece and Spain) that aims to contribute promoting the sustainability of the initiatives of Social and Solidarity Economy among its current actors and those young people who want to enter the sector.