The final conference of the GRAPE – Local Social Green Resilience Action Plans for small and peripheral territories project, co-funded by the European Commission under the SMP-COSME-2021-RESILIENCE-SEM call, will be held on Monday, October 16, via streaming.

The conference will offer the opportunity to share and discuss the main results of the processes that brought the 4 communities partner – Mirabella Imbaccari, Malegno, Bonares and Sifnos –  to draft their Local Social Green Resilience Action Plans and analyse their implications at a more general level for any remote and rural area, also introducing a digital toolkit for small communities interested in implementing the same participatory processes.

GRAPE has joined 4 small territories in 3 countries (Italy, Spain and Greek) together with an experienced European public authorities’ and SSE actors’ network (REVES) and a regional cooperative network (FAECTA). For each territory, in addition to the respective municipalities, an SSE organisation has been involved: Fondazione MeSSInA (leader partner) in Mirabella Imbaccari, Sol.Co. Camunia in Malegno, COOPINTE in Bonares and Wind Of Renewal in Sifnos.

From EUROSTAT and LAU2 data, there are about 121,000 small municipalities in the EU, often located in disadvantaged areas, far away from mainstream public development policies and with small budgets and administrative capacities. These are contexts in which social economy actors play a key role, for planning that integrates social, economic and environmental dimensions, fielding them and ensuring their long-term functioning.