This week, Nordregio’s researchers Anna Berlina and Gustaf Norlén will present a draft of a new Empowerment Handbook, offering guidelines for local service providers in the Baltic Sea Region.
Many rural areas of the Baltic Sea Region find themselves in a downward spiral, where outward migration and economic downturn lead to a deterioration of service infrastructure and quality of life and vice versa. In order to tackle this problem, SEMPRE project aims to promote empowerment in social service provision in rural areas. Social service providers such as welfare and public sector organisations, NGOs and social enterprises are encouraged and enabled to involve end users – namely members of disadvantaged groups such as single parents, the elderly or migrants – in the development and delivery of social services.
In SEMPRE project, Nordregio is responsible for compiling and writing an Empowerment Handbook. The main purpose of it is to provide inspiration and guidance for local service providers who are willing to work with empowerment and end user involvement in rural areas of the Baltic Sea Region. At earlier stages, the project partners have established the Local Empowerment Networks (LEN) and identified the needs of the end users by using empowerment tools.
The project runs from 01/03/2016 until 28/02/2019. Find more information here: http://www.sempre-project.eu/
