25 social entrepreurs are coming together in Warsaw!

The 25 social entrepreneurs are coming from 10 countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Hungary, Kosovo, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. They will attend a 4-day summit on social innovation at SAP in Poland, where they will build up on their ideas. The 10 of them get the chance to pitch their idea at the final event, happening on the 10th of November from 10 am - 2pm at  the Business Link PGE Narodowy, Al. Ks. J. Poniatowskiego 1, 03-901 Warszawa (National Stadium). Join us there!

Short description of the 25 social start-ups:

Lokalizo (Kosovo): Lokalizo is an open source report-mapping software that enables community members to record and report common community problems to an appropriate authority. Users of Lokalizo, will be able to easily report community problems on a wide range of areas and issues affecting their environment like: Waste Management, Walking Hazards, Sanitation Problems, Traffic hazards and Issues, Infrastructure and Construction Risks, Recreational Parks, Safety, and Disaster Risk Reduction. Suitably, internet penetration in Kosovo and region is increasing at a very fast rate. According to a 2013 report by the Kosovo Association of Information and Communication, internet penetration based on users is 76.6% and based on households is 84.8%. There are many ways on which this internet is being utilized, thus the potential to attract citizens to use the internet for civic engagement is very high; especially for issues that affect them directly in their daily lives (i.e garbag e, broken stairs in the neighborhood, open hole, etc). Thus, a solution which is easily accessed through a mobile app or through a website, has the potential to become an important tool of change if it gets the necessary support from agents who recognize the crucial role that technology can play in improving life in our communities.  

Social Impact School (Bosnia and Herzegovina): Collecting young people and people in needs, in one place, where they can learn, develop and help they community to grown.We are a grope of young people with different jobs, educations and backgrounds.We are engineers, architects, designers, photographers, artists, and more than that. Our mission is to educate young people in way like supporting them to develop creativity, power of learning and other possibilities. We have all kinds of kids. Some of them are good in athlete, good in sports, and other kids are good in other things. We want to make a one place where we could give them opportunities to develop learning and all kinds of other skills. In our project we are planing to include kids with special needs and kids with difficulties. We will finance our program and material supplies with monthly low cost subscriptions. On monthly base we will make fairs and events to show work of our students.

TimeHeroesPro (Bulgaria): The project aims at helping NGOs attract and utilise professional services for free at a local level. I want to create a flexible IT platform that can be easily localised for the respective language and culture that matches skilled volunteers with non-profit organisations and groups of active citizens.
Most non-profits recruit and organise volunteers for their social, cultural and environmental causes reaching only for the general type of physical support, this way ensuring that enough help will be garnered. But many times, for an organisation to be sustainable and effective, it needs professional expertise that is way out and above its budget resources. There are a few existing skill-based volunteer platforms which are limited in geographical reach - and thus in impact - due to language barriers (mostly English) and focus on a certain country.
The platform will give the opportunity to highly skilled professionals to support the causes they like pro bono, while helping NGOs use hardly accessible resources, in their language and on their own territory.

Elephant Society (Bulgaria): Brand that educates and employs people from the minorities to create handmade fabrics with bohemian vibe, using the block printing technique. Brand that educates and employs people from the minorities to create handmade fabrics with bohemian vibe, using the block printing technique.  

Code In Rose (Albania): Code in Rose is a community which empowers girls in technology, fights stereotypes with stereotypes and creates a sharing community where every learner is a teacher. Code in rose is a connection between feminism,technology,humanism and creativity.Building the environment where technology doesn’t discriminate and where sharing is caring. The wall of mental judging in all technological fields has created stereotypes and as one of the problems technology is making young people tending to have more an asocial behavior.As a project we are fighting stereotypes with stereotypes and creating an environment where every learner is a teacher.A sharing community with girls who share the same passion.We aim to sensitize and train females in technological fields in order to empower them and offer them working opportunities.We want to raise awareness of the gender gap and that females are capable of not only being successful engineers but able to be true ambassadors of humanism.We as a group plan to attain this goal by organizing,workshops,and teaching classes where every girl will be trained in order to share her knowledg e with another group of girls.We are creating an online community too where girls which are trained during our workshops will work in order to help people with technologic problems, teaching lessons, consulting. One of main part of Code in Rose initiative is helping not only urban zone but we are concentrating our attention to rural zones where girls have the same passion but not the same opportunities. The latest project will be focused at the Roma girls and all the trained Roma girls will train their own community with shared knowledge.

YMCA Serbia Social Business (Serbia): To help with school-to-job transition of unemployed young people in our community, we are about to launch two social businesses (a day-care center and a second-hand shop) for which I have designed the business models and raised 60% of funding. The businesses/projects would offer young people with training and first work experience in relevant professional fields. What makes these businesses unique is that both of them cater to a real need of the consumers and have the ability to generate revenues, in addition to solving the issue of youth unemployment. The projects would run as follows: first, young people would receive preparatory training in retail, accounting, management, leadership and other skills needed to work on the businesses successfully, which would be delivered in partnership with local employers. After the preparatory training they would work directly on the two businesses under the guidance of an experienced YMCA Serbia leader. After completion of a certain employment period, the first trainees would exit the traineeship to allow for new trainees to join. We would support the outgoing trainees with recommendation letters, CV and interview preparations as well as with initiating contacts with potential employers.    

MagicMe inclusive playground equipment (Hungary): We develop and sell a range of playground equipment on which disabled and non-disabled kids can play together without boundaries. MagikMe Ltd, founded in 2013 by parents raising disabled children designs and sells special playground equipment on which able-bodied and disabled children can play together, the latter without using wheelchairs. The mission of MagikMe is to enable early childhood integration of the disabled and to shape the attitude of the majority towards the disabled, thus facilitating dialog and cooperation. The beneficiaries of the playground equipments are families of local communities, while the customers are the ones building and maintaining playgrounds (local municipalities, educational institutions, property developers, landscape architects) and distributors.    

Maedow Foundation /Fundacja Łąka : We bring flowers to the people. Short cut laws are expensive, boring and gives nothing to enviroment.

Why not to replace them with flower meadows which are ecological, practical and beautifull. In our work we try to combine love to flower, botanical knowlage with cultural richness of polish agiculture. We organise events, workshops and concerts. With us you can lear how to name wildflowers, sow and mow  meadow or make a seedbomb. Pinch of seed is all you need to make a difference.

Aldazank (Poland): Using the advantages, entertaining tools and new technology of developed countries to support the solution of disadvantages and women's inequality in the countries suffering from poverty.

The international line of the project relates to women empowerment and their life condition improvement in countries such as Guatemala, India, Cambodia and Africa through fashion- female artisans' fashion. With cooperation of 6 organizations and social businesses we are working on new "channels" of promoting the mission and spreading it among new generation as they are our target group plus fashion is highly suitable for the mission better visibility. So far there have been numerous methods used to address social issues to young generation, however, they have not been very effective. Thus, our aim is to use new methods/ entertaining tools such as music, photography or fashion bloggers, fashion weeks for higher, social purpose. The mission of connecting nowadays catchy and entertaining tools for higher purposes we find astonishing and from our perspective (as young people) this is the only one way to make the new generation involved into helping the social businesses to grow and to solve accurate issue and in the case of our project: life conditions of women in countries suffering from poverty.    

#DOMINOEFFECT (Slovenia): The #DOMINOEFFECT is a socially responsible initiative that focuses on raising awareness of society about positive values. The main goal of the initiative is to invite people to make a promise of what will they do or change to make the world of tomorrow a better place. Focus is to address the passiveness of society and to encourage active citizenship. It is designed as a viral campaign. (Inspiration - ice bucket challenge). The solution for sustainable society is to get communities and people to be more aware of positive values. The focus is to encourage active citizenship among people. Active citizens are individuals who want to make a positive difference in their community. The result of the project is to achieve the domino effect where people make a promise (I’ll recycle from now on) of what they will do in their community to contribute to the world of better tomorrow, record it and post it to social media while naming and encouraging three other friends to make a promise themselves. The wider the reach the more effect it will have on the mindset of people and society. Every generation can participate.The idea starts with a pool of participating people and achieve domino effect through social media nominations. Web page promise counter will count promises made with a completion rate counter. How many people made a promise, how many kept it and made a difference, how many were affected? The goal is to reach the vastest amount of people possible. The initiative is using the resource of different social media and people active on them while using the concept of viral campaign to reach out to encourage social media users to participate, to act. The main focus of the initiative is to create a viral campaign to change the mindset of society being passive into being active citizens who want to contribute and will make a difference in their society.    

Civil Patrols (Bosnia and Herzegovina):  A mobile application that allows citizens to actively participate in the fight against crime, corruption, terrorism and similar problems that society faces today. Our clients are state security services and agencies, the police, authorities for the preservation of public peace and order and the application users are citizens who can report a violence, terrorism and many other illegal activities at any time. All this could be done via mobile application where the crime report can be descriptive, photo and video, automatically marked with coordinates (location), report time and date etc.    

Open Source Bike Share (Slovakia): Open Source Bike Share is the world’s first low-cost and open source bike sharing system. It is a bottom-up bicycle sharing system suitable for smaller communities or areas such as campuses, companies etc. Anyone can start their own bike share easily by using our software/app. The goal is to provide easily accessible no-cost open source (or low cost) system for anyone to launch their private, community or public bikeshare. Our system can also be also used for trialling bike share in communities, where decision to launch large scale (commercial/expensive) public bikeshare needs to be based on hard data.    

The Code Success Academy (Bulgaria): The Code Success Academy (CSA) offers special blended classes for learning Mathematics, ICT, English and Bulgarian, providing VET education in Bulgaria. It is a two phase learning process - (1st) Alignment of the acquired knowledge of each student with the CSA knowledge taxonomy ( 6 months) and (2nd) acquiring professional specialization in different fields, e.g. ICT, financial management etc., for a period of 2 years. By this moment CSF is partnering with the Software University, and is providing a full 2 year learning cycle in front-end, back-end development, software architecture and graphic design. CSA also engages in the job search for its recruits after the 1st year of completion.

Coaching & Matchmaking For Disabled People (Bulgaria): I want to help disabled people from all over the world to create a life they love and attract the love of their life. I will help them believe that they deserve and can meet a compatible partner to share their life with and teach them how to attract and consciously choose this person on their own. I will achieve this via one-one coaching and via training disabled and non-disabled people to coach and do matchmaking. As for matchmaking, my idea is to use my network and the network of the disabled person to generate potential partners for dates, mainly via social media and special software developed for this purpose. This will be in a way crowd matchmaking. I plan to introduce as well online video speed dating.  

INBOX (Romania): INBOX is a studio that designs and develops sustainable architecture, green buildings and beautiful design spaces out of worn-out shipping containers. Our mission: to build a sustainable future by solving local and global problems in the housing, food and energy industry. Every single product that is designed at INBOX is built with the following things in mind.Mobile: Built out of shipping containers, the structure can be transported easily and cheaply. We offer a plug and play solution where you do not have to worry about any additional equipment or instalation. Everything is built within the structure, making it easy to set up and move in the future. Modular: No matter if it is a house, an office or an urban farm, shipping containers can be converted easily and inexpensively. The modules can be merged, divided and reshaped as needs change. Sustainable: the products are designed for the circular economy, which is based on a principle of “upcycling” - the art of refining worn-out resources. Those buildings have a 80% lower CO2 footprint in the production phase than traditional buildings. In other words, we design and develop solutions with an eye for the circular economy that are as cool as they are green.  

Visually Impaired People (Bulgaria):  The Visually Impaired People (VIP ) Academy will educate, train and empower the local community of blind and visually impaired people in order to develop an environment for change, inspiration and action. Currently most of the blind and visually impaired people in Bulgaria are underdeveloped in sense of social skills, soft skills, digital skills and etc. The VIP Academy will provide basic level of programs for effective communication, listening skills, presentation skills, anti-discrimination knowledge, assertiveness and personal development through onlline and offline learning.Trainers, mentors and coaches will be both blind and sighted professionals and the learning will be mutual, because the blind trainers will exchange and support the sighted ones in developing a 360 degrees model for talent development and leadership formats for development of resilience, empathy, mindfulness and right-brain activities. The target audience is the community of blind and proactive young people in Bulgaria and the innovation is based on development of the integrated 360 model, which would benefit the learning and development programs of the business.    

Vocational Consunselling Program (Romania): The Vocational Consunselling Program is aimed to help high school students (16-17 years old) to find more about themselves in order to be able to choose the most suited professional way. The program lasts for no more than one year and consists in three modules: Module 1 - centered on self awareness and self discovery; Module 2 - centered on practical activities in various fields, based on students' needs; Module 3 - focused on coaching and support for the students. Although there will be several professionals taking part of the program as teachers (coaches, psychologists, trainers etc.) they will not give solutions to the students, but they will provide the frame and the tools for them to find their motivation and their career path. Students will benefit of a blended-learning approach (various activities and learning methods: trainings, practice workshops, on-site activities, non-formal tools, online resources etc.).    

Storyteracy Project (Bulgaria): Storyteracy Project introduces an alternative method to combat functional illiteracy using reading and writing creative techniques, which determines building new and lasting emotional bonds with texts. Functional illiteracy is a major social problem in Easter European countries, which is not given enough attention in actual formal educational systems and the Storyteracy Project intend to approach it from a new and inovative perspective, widely applicable. The project focuses on functional illiteracy issues and aims to make participants from target group to change their social perspective, using practical methods by exploiting imagination and creative potential. The project gathers groups of students. Each group attend ludic activities where they are challenged to listen, write, illustrate and perform imagined history of an object / phenomenon / feeling / person of their choice, in order to improve understanding, memorizing and communicating ideas. The method is based on listening and creative reading. It helps better understanding of the content of a story, encourages the invention of original texts and leads to diminishing the functional illiteracy.    

Traveling Knowledge Agent on Sustainability (Hungary): Traveling Knowledge Agent on Sustainability (TRAS) intends to create a new professional profile of a ‘travelling teacher’ or ‘climate agent’ who is able to spread a mitigation and adaptation strategy within the local communities based on the expertise developed by Climate-KIC. The TRAS Program includes a training program for the professionals who are able to help students, families, companies, local communities to raise awareness to transition and climate challeng, providing information on how to take care about the environment and promote positive changes in their daily behaviour. The TRASs will travel across the regions working ‘on demand’ by keeping on-site courses, workshops, seminars and labs focusing on transition and climate change challenges. During their work they will use the toolbox based on Climate-KIC knowledge base which consists of up-to-date climate related information, methodology materials and examples. The TRASs will cooperate with experts to present real life cases. The TRAS Program vision is to create Travelling Agents who are able to communicate with people at their own comfortable circumstances – becoming trustful ambassadors of Sustainable Transition of Climate-KIC (road-show for promoting Climate-KIC at the same time). Meanwhile, they can also support other (existing) Climate-KIC programs with spreading and promoting them. The TRAS program offers ½ day to 1 week long courses, which can be demanded throughout the year.    

INAT Centre (Serbia): During the project IT Jobs for Young Leaders in the 4th Industrial Revolution peers across CEE region, Europe and other continents will get connected on a platform about Virtual and Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Serious Gaming so as to further expand their business skills thanks to mentor approach, video and written content, as well as to put their apps and solutions in these four niches on the marketplace. Since 2015 activities of the organisation INAT Centre have been in alignment with these goals: preparing youth for the job market through entrepreneurship and employment trainings, conducting international projects and conferences, and collaborating with stakeholders (companies, universities, government institutions, NGOs) in Serbia, Western Balkans and world-wide. So far 10 people are active in INAT Centre and they have 3-10 years of project management experience. The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs has identified that although there are millions of unemployed workers across Europe, almost 825.000 jobs in ICT (information and telecommunication) sector can remain unfulfilled by 2020. Therefore, this project IT Jobs for Young Leaders in the 4th Industrial Revolution will equip young people with skills for IT jobs in three steps: 1) On the platform with videos and materials for business success and brilliant habits Millennials could start 30-day challenges, improve their emotional intelligence, set compelling business goals and follow through. 2) They could read the special content section and job ads about four emerging technologies which will generate most future jobs and require employees from both engineering and arts background: Virtual and Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Serious Gaming. 3) Finally, Millennials would be able to download apps relevant for these technologies to improve their business skills or marketplace their own solutions.    

kult hub (Romania): KULT Hub is a modern work space where teenagers will form a proactive community and acquire a range of skills through non-formal education activities. In Roman city there are 2,500 teenagers between 15-19 years old who become our target. High school should prepare them for college and a future career path, but soft skills trainings are missing from high school curriculum. We offer two main products to solve their problems: 1. Monthly membership subscription to KULT hub 2. Single Ticket Event. During a month we have these recurring benefits: 2 non formal education trainings in soft skills, 2 collective courses (additional preparing in mathematics or computer science), 1 conference with motivational speakers / 1 sports competition, unlimited space access between 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and to our resources. In addition, young people can also benefit through our organization from: Participation / involvement in national projects, Youth exchanges, Camps, Movie nights. The members will benefit from programs based on self esteem and learning. A teenager will spend on average 50 hours per month in the hub, participating in various learning activities and relaxation. The business model is composed of three pillars: 1. A constant growing community of valuable teenagers; 2. Developing partnerships with institutions and companies to support the youth community; Through our programs, we want to involve also the institutions and organizations from the business environment that aim to change the society in a positive matter through education. 3. Scalability – implement this project in other small cities in need.    

Loveguide (Bulgaria): Loveguide is dedicated to filling the gaps in sexual health education of Bulgarian teenagers. In December 2015 we launched our online platform loveguide.bg. It's safe and anonymous place where teenagers can learn (and ask questions about) everything they need to know about love, sex and relationships to be healthy and happy. It's not only about STD's and birth control, but also about communication and being responsible and tolerant with their peers. Besides the traditional topics in sex ed, it exhausts topics like sexual harassment, homosexuality, sex and the internet and many more. It's educational, but most importantly it's positive, friendly and honest, short, simple and clear. So that the teenagers can open up to the messages and actually make use of our information. Of course, it's any-device friendly so that they can have the right information in the palm of their hand at any time. We (aim to) update it as often an d regularly as possible. In 2016 we started visiting schools all around the country and introducing it to kids and teachers. The interest is huge, including from parents. The meetings have turned into sex ed workshops and the demand for them is growing. For the activities so far, we had the financial support of Reach for Change and Vivacom Fund. We need more resources of any kind to be able to grow off- and online and have social impact as our test showed that our idea, approach and implementation work.    

Conflict Kitchen(Poland):In the face of the radicalization of public debate and the lack of political will to support refugees during current crisis, we wanted to create pretexts for meetings and a better understanding of each other. This is important both for the communities of foreigners, as well as for ourselves. Conflict Kitchen exemplifies that we do not have to be indifferent about growing xenophobia and the hate speech.Our project is primarily a social enterprise - the basis for an integration of the foreigners with the inhabitants of Warsaw.

Cyclically changing menu includes dishes from different parts of the world. Initiative is accompanied by educational and cultural program prepared by an international team. To each order goes with personal history of person with migration experience, information on the political situation in a given region or interesting facts related to culture, art and social life. Those different perspectives reflect the diversity of each country and contribute to the conversations and discussions with our guests. During lectures, workshops and film screenings residents of Warsaw have a great chance of gaining deeper and better understanding about current events of the country. For foreigners who co-create the project it is an opportunity to get to know Polish culture and to establish close relations in a friendly professional space. By p roposing fair terms of employment and training we are giving newcomers a better and safer start on the Polish labor market.

city improov (Romania): How do you make a city better? One proposition is a platform that targets specific city problems, a platform where citizens have a voice, city hall learns about the problems and together get the problems solved. These problems are design problems, are day to day inefficiencies in the city life (traffic, public transportation, pedestrian, subway, biking experience, etc.). The platform targets low cost/high impact problems and corresponding solutions, fast implementing ideas. Involving as many citizens as possible assures diversity in problems/solutions observed, much better and faster than a specialized city hall department. The platform taps into the problems/solutions which more than often end up discussed during friendly meetings, work breaks, or they just stay and get forgotten in someone’s head. The platform will make those brilliant ideas come to life. How it works? Citizens and firms will submit a problem/solutions via the embedded map. The platform administrator analyzes the problem/solution and posts the problem or gives feedback to the user. Other citizens will visualize the signaled problem and will vote on the existing solutions or submit another solution. Voting mechanism allows a direct involvement and transparent decision of the citizens. City hall will be invited to create a user on the platform and will provide feedback on the signaled problems, on the viability of the solutions proposed. Each problem/solution will have a follow-up, timeframe and resolution.    

Date a Startup (Romania): Date a Startup is an educational platform that hacks the ways young people start their career and the way companies act towards millennials. Date a Startup is built on 3 pillars: internships platform in startups, a mentorship program for students and bootcamps of organisational culture for startups. Through the internships platform we are trying to make students become great professionals faster, by putting them in a new working environment- that of startups and medium size companies. The reason why we are looking into startups is because we believe the environment is very fast paced and graduates can learn faster and have the chance of getting involved in more projects and seing businesses growing, by being in the middle of things. To enhance this experience,we are implementing a mentorship program that one can enroll in. The role of this program is for young professionals to be mentored and learn from the best the ropes of being a great professional. Last but not least, we are looking into organising bootcamps for startup owners for people’s management and organisational culture design. There, they will learn how to know themselves better as managers, their teams and encourage employees to be proactive and have a longer retention program of millennials. We believe that our projects are touching both necessities of young professionals, as well as those of employers so that both parties can have a flourishing relationship.