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 will carry out activities to raise awareness and disseminate good practices from all EU countries identified in the project. It kicked off in May 2023, with a duration of 18 months, and is funded by the European Innovation Council and the Executive Agency for SMEs (EISMEA) under call SMP-COSME-2022-BUYSOCIALB2BMARKET.

Find out more

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.

Therefore, 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 Torino Social Impact platform to activate and multiply concrete actions. The goal is to make Torino Social Impact a national and international model of social procurement.

The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol is a call aimed at partners who can 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. The BUY SOCIAL TSI protocol is available at the link, to join simply fill out the form indicating the commitments the organization intends to pursue.