EXPAND
EXPAND is a three-year Erasmus+ project to develop a methodology for accelerating ideas to resolve social challenges. Esade collaborates on the project with ESSEC and other European entrepreneurship and social innovation organizations. The Esade team consists of Guillermo Casasnovas and Deborah Gold of the Esade Center for Social Impact, Ignasi Martí and Sonia Navarro of the Institute for Social Innovation, and Josep Alías of the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute.
Esade has co-developed, together with ESSEC, the methodology for a pilot program taught at Esade as a course in the MSc program. This first edition focused on developing solutions linked to the challenge of homelessness. As part of the pilot, the Esade team and their partners developed a desk research report on homelessness in Barcelona, Paris, and Ghent. You can read the report below.
During the course, students spent the initial weeks understanding the challenge of homelessness by doing ethnographic research and applying systems thinking. They then used other design thinking and social innovation tools to propose solutions based on social entrepreneurship approaches. Students worked with real cases from local organizations and visited the Greek NGO Diogenis as part of their study tour.
The results and the methodology will be shared with other European institutions from next year as a tool for other social challenges.
621727-EPP-1-2020-1-BEEPPKA2-KA (Project identification number)
Desk research report
This research on homelessness, focused on cities, demonstrates we face a very complex problem that affects the analysis and the search for solutions based on social entrepreneurship. We can first see this complexity when trying to grasp it from a European perspective. There is a lack of a standard definition of the concept of homelessness, thus there is no European-wide approach to tackle the problem from a public policy focus. This is why we think the homelessness problem, being a global one that keeps worsening over time, has to be seized, analyzed and tackled from a city perspective.
This report presents the main takeaways from the research, focused on three cities: Barcelona, Paris, Ghent.
Funded by
