This week, we had the pleasure of spending a brilliant afternoon talking about young people, entrepreneurship, collaboration and how to strengthen all these things in the region of Dalarna, at an event we organised at Dalarna Science Park in Borlänge together with Region Dalarna, Falu kommun and Coompanion Dalarna.

We got to listen to young people, entrepreneurs, intermediaries and local government representatives to hear their thoughts on how to strengthen collaboration and to share some of our learnings from our LOCAL-Y-MPACT project.

Project wrap-up

As we’re wrapping up our Erasmus funded project LOCAL-Y-MPACT that we’ve done together with our partners in Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Portugal, we’re able to gather a lot of information, learnings and new ideas that promote and strengthen cross-sector collaboration, especially between municipalities and local organisations and social enterprises. But there are insights and take-outs that are useful for all sorts of organisations in all sorts of situations when wanting to develop the organisation, try new ways or find new actors to explore development with.

Key take-outs highlight the importance of taking the time to research what it is you want to achieve, why and for whom. To be open to exploring what other actors might be doing similar work to see whether you can reach out, learn from each other and maybe team up, to create something bigger and better than if you’d go for it on your own.

Many have great ideas to create a better society, but not one organisation, institution or sector can solve our societal challenges alone. We need knowledge from the field, ideas from entrepreneurs, experience from institutions, networks and capital from the private sector and we need to be brave enough to step out of our box and explore new ways of doing things.

Tools and reports

Throughout the project we’ve put together various documents, reports, tools and guides and we’ve listed them all below:

• What are the needs and challenges when creating collaborations? Find the report here.
• Five useful steps to boost local cooperation – find the report here.
• Policy recommendations for enhanced cross-sector cooperation – find the full document here.
• Roadmap and checklists towards finding, developing and maintaining successful partnerships – find all documents here.