New curricula, education methods and training courses for professionals in the welfare sector working with co-creation .
Co-creation is highlighted on the European agenda, and while previous EU funded projects have shown that co-creation is a significant profit to the European society they have also shown that local authorities lack the ability to implement the concept sufficiently.
The overall aim with the Co-creating Welfare project is thus to improve the implementation of co-creation in the welfare sector on a local level trough development and testing of a common European set of training material for professional practitioners.
All of this is done in order to push forward the needed re-organisation and effectiveness in the public welfare sector in a Europe, where local authorities are still struggling with cut-downs to recover from the worldwide financial crisis.
Aims and education
Co-creation is a method that is highly appreciated in the public welfare sector, and previous project has shown that local authorities across Europe are very happy to engage volunteers in their daily work. Unfortunately the system and the staff are not always prepared to apply the method simply because they are educated to work differently.
The Co-Creating Welfare project aims to changes these circumstances by developing training material trough a bottom-up approach based on dialogue and local cases and challenges to ensure that the target group understands an acknowledges the need of co-creation while also feeling motivated and willing to promote and use co-creation as a part of their work.
By educating the professional practitioners to be able to facilitate and lead the co-creation processes the hope is to transform the use of the method to a win-win situation for all stakeholders. Moreover, the local authorities can benefit from staff that has developed skills to reflect on the potential of rethinking and redesigning local solutions. This will be of great importance when implementing new ways of working in the future.
Throughout the entire project process the target group – the professionals working with public welfare on a daily bases – will be involved. All of this to ensure relevance, usability, availability and sustainability.
The main target groups for the Co-creating Welfare project activities are: