The registration period for Comun_ESS, Meeting of Communication and Solidarity Economy, which will celebrate its third edition from 15 to 17 March in Barcelona, is now open.

Organized by the Xarxa de Economia Solidària and the REAS Red de Redes, these dates will be used to meet and continue to reflect and build a new communication paradigm that reflects the values of the SSE and allows us to broaden our reach, our audience and our practices.

Under the slogan “They talk about us”, this edition of the meeting will include training, conferences, round tables and practical workshops to explore new tasks, resources and strategies for building communication for social transformations. Initiatives and projects from all over Spain will be present, as well as people responsible for communicating the different SSE initiatives.

More information:: comunicarestransformar.net

Through different dissemination activities of the Spanish solidarity economy network (REAS), a campaign to facilitate the inclusion of social clauses in the processes of public procurement was started, to stimulate institutions to purchase based on ethical, ecological and transparency criteria and extend the knowledge of these tools of social justice, equity and sharing throughout the social solidarity economy  and society in general.

The campaign claims the use of public procurement as a useful way to work in depth on social core values such as cohesion and social inclusion, local and sustainable development and efficiency, fairness and transparency in public spending. In this sense, the “Guide to the public socially responsible procurement” published by REAS Euskadi underlines how “it is illogical to transfer the public budgets to companies that pollute,  do not respect the rights of the workers, who practice gender discrimination and do not meet the criterion of 2% of disabled persons required by the legislation”.

Adapting the legislation of the Spanish State purchasing and public procurement requires a definition of the legal framework and the ethical criteria affecting 17% of GDP (18 million euro according to 2015 data). Social and solidarity economy networks, environmental organizations and social movements have multiplied the criticism about the slowness with which the required minimums are translated at the level of our administrations. Indeed, the European directives published in 2014 and which should have been adopted at latest in April 2016 have not yet been incorporated in the legal system of the Spanish State.

Read the rest of the article (in Spanish) here.

Published in December 2015, this extensive report provides the main results – in terms of qualitative and quantitative indicators – of the Social audit which includes a total of 320 organisations, members of the regional SSE networks and of REAS, Red de Redes de Economía Alternativa y Solidaria (Alternative and Solidarity Economy and Networks of Network, hereinafter REAS) in Spain.

The information obtained from the surveyed entities in each territorial / sectoral network, provides information and data about 30 issues (relating to the dimension of the organization, its functioning, its commitment and responsible labor, internal democracy and participation within the organization, etc.), with which a total of 19 monitoring indicators of the level of compliance of the 6 inspiring principles of the ESS, described in the REAS “Solidarity Economy Charter”, are analysed.

Download the report (in Spanish)

See an infographic of the social audit results: