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MailThe European project PROSECO
PROSECO – Procurement for (a) Social Economy, co-funded by the Interreg Europe Programme, aims to strengthen the role of social procurement in public policies and business practices, with the goal of creating job opportunities for those who are furthest from the labour market.
Through the collaboration of 11 partners from 9 European countries – including Torino Social Impact and the City of Turin – PROSECO aims to turn procurement into a practical tool for social impact, capable of fostering inclusion and generating shared value.
Launched in May 2025, the project will run until 2029 and is structured around four lines of action: making contracting authorities more inclusive, fostering collaboration between the social economy and traditional businesses, enhancing market access for social economy enterprises and testing innovative financial tools for social goals.
The European project Buy Social
Buy Social picks up the legacy of the Social Procurement project, which aimed to promote innovative forms of delivery in the local area, in the public and private systems, in order to support the growth of social impact businesses and activities, taking it to a European level: in each partner country, a social economy federation or support structure carried out activities to raise awareness and disseminate good practices from all EU countries identified in the initiative.
The project, funded by the European Innovation Council and the Executive Agency for SMEs (EISMEA) under call SMP-COSME-2022-BUYSOCIALB2BMARKET, took place between May 2023 and December 2024 and included a communication campaign and a pilot platform designed to to locate social impact enterprises. The portal brings together various social entrepreneurship entities, such as cooperatives and social enterprises, benefit corporations and innovative startups with a social mission.Today, the platform features over 150 enterprises, which can be browsed and filtered by service or product offered, type of enterprise, and main social mission.
Visit the portal at this link
Social Procurement, the Responsible Choice for Businesses
From the collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce of Turin, Torino Social Impact, Unione Industriali Torino, and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, an online series of meetings was born to delve into the topic of social procurement, promoting responsible choices for businesses.
The meetings examined the main aspects of this business strategy, exploring both the elements of greatest interest for business development (supply side) and the main opportunities for market entry (demand side), which, in addition to meeting the needs of businesses, generate positive impacts on the territory.
The online series of meetings began on June 5th 2024 (How to integrate business demand) and continued on July 3rd 2024 (How to integrate business strategy), with a final session on September 24th 2024 (Promoting the social market).
This initiative was part of the Turin Capital of Business Culture 2024 programme and was carried out within the framework of Buy Social.
The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol history – experimentation with forms of social procurement at the local level
In the last half of 2021, a survey on social impact purchasing in Piedmont had been conducted, involving both the social enterprise and private worlds. It emerged that there was widespread interest in the private world on the topic of social impact procurement and in general on the topic of collaboration with the world of social enterprise, accompanied, however, by a lack of knowledge of this world and prejudices about its ability to compete in the market.
In 2022, the proposal was born to build a joint protocol to foster social procurement through communication and awareness plans and by taking advantage of the large number of members of the platform to activate and multiply concrete actions. The aim was to position Torino Social Impact as a national and international model of social procurement.
The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol took shape through a call aimed at partners, who were invited to test themselves by engaging on a very concrete issue for the development of the impact economy by joining and guaranteeing their commitment on actions such as: social procurement; capacity building aimed at the third sector; collaborative B2B or other forms of collaboration; and integration of impact in their business documents.
