WILCO - Welfare innovations at the local level in favour of cohesion,

German WILCO members' Adalbert Evers & Benjamin Ewert from Giessen will present this article at the ESPAnet Anniversary Conference at the School of Social and Political Science of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland).

The article will be presented as part of the “Social Innovation and Social Investment” stream. More information about the vairous streams included in the conference can be found here.

The WILCO Midterm Seminar was held at the Committee of the Regions (Brussels) on May 30th, 2012, The half-day event aimed at sharing some of the project intermediate findings with policy-makers and representatives of public administrations. As a way of providing some thought-provoking points for the discussion, we counted with the presence of excellent spakers, namely, MEP Pervenche Berès, Chairwoman of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and Mrs Louise Pulford, from the Young Foundation and Head of Social Innovation Exchange.

The comment of Mrs Berès on the significance of social innovation in the European Parliament is available on video here.

In addition, the particular vision about social innovation from an artists perspective was presented by Amsterdam-based artist, Masha Ru. Her short-film (available here) on a specific social innovation housing initiative for artists in The Netherlands (The Bookstore Project) offered a fresh look at this social innovation experience in the field of housing.

Some of the pictures of the event are available here.

Program of the WILCO Midterm Seminar - 306 KB

Last March 21st, WILCO partner, Annette Zimmer participated in a radio series where she talked about WILCO and how it is being carried out in Münster (the other German city included in WILCO as case study is Berlin). The ocassion was a seminar she delivered as part of the Münster-Lille cooperative courses in political science titled "Münster Marketing? A check-up on housing, child care and labour market policies" (Münster Marketing? Wohnungsbau-, Kinderbetreuungs- und Arbeitsmarktpolitik auf dem Prüfstand ). One of the central topics of a seminar was WILCO and specifically its focus on housing as a crucial policy area for improvement through local social innovations.

The radio clip can be heard in German by clicking here.

As part of one of the political science courses taught by Prof. Annette Zimmer at University of Münster, students were asked to produce a film on one of the WILCO topics. The film, entitled "Kinderhaus”, focuses on housing problems in a northern suburb of Münster.

We would like to thank the student production team and Prof. Zimmer for allowing us to share this piece with WILCO stakeholders.