Event Details

Euclid Summit
Hotel Sheraton
Zagreb, Croatia
24-26 February 2016

Event Description

By Gojko Bežovan

TSI member Gojko Bežovan presented TSI’s work in a keynote presentation on „Barriers and challenges to developing the third sector across Europe” at this year’s Euclid Summit in Zagreb. He summed up some of the preliminary results of the project’s work on barriers and drivers for the third sector. The presentation also linked findings to the “know-how” skills areas that the Euclid Summit focused on: „knowhow“ for people, money and impact.

Participants recognized the importance of articulating challenges the third sector is facing in the public domain, to rally support for further sector development. The discussion has shown, once again, that the concept of the third sector is still difficult to grasp among practitioners, who raised questions of definition and boundaries.

Part of the discussion and also a lot of conference topics were related to social entrepreneurship, highlighting the need to develop social entrepreneurship and it’s still relatively “weak” position in Croatia. A significant space for further advancement of social entrepreneurship in is seen in the area of providing social services.

Overall, the summit emphasised the importance of mutual learning and networking. Building sustainable partnerships and collaborations was generally presented as a key asset to developing social innovations and sustainability of social enterprises. Measuring the impact of third sector activities, the social value created, was recognized as a new demand to practitioners and a key challenges the sector is facing.

Euclid Summit highlighted that the third sector, in a rapidly changing world in which new social risks are emerging, needs to constantly build its capacities to be able to the drive social impact and change.

Prof. Bezovan’s presentation is avaliable for download below.