Civil society's innovative solutions for a sustainable society

Civil society and idea-driven organizations have a long tradition of developing innovative solutions. Much that we take for granted today in welfare such as public dental care, elderly care and child care centers has from the beginning been created by people who have come together with a common idea of improving society. How can we better utilize the capacity of civil society to contribute to innovations for social development?

In the autumn of 2021, Vinnova opened a call for proposals to strengthen the organizations' innovative capacity and opportunity to collaborate for system innovation. With the call, we wanted to strengthen civil society's conditions for co-creating, establishing or further developing innovative solutions in cross-sectoral collaboration. But also strengthen the organizations' ability to create long-term collaboration and partnerships to be able to scale and implement the solutions.

Below are some of the projects that have initiatives aimed at children:

Equal right to active and meaningful leisure activities - for children and young people with functional variation

Children and young people with functional variation have less access to municipal leisure activities than other children, this is due to how the activities are organized and that it is up to the individual to organize their own leisure activities. This project is about developing a collaboration model in 6 municipalities in the Stockholm area so that, with the vision that all children and young people, regardless of functional variation, will have the conditions to create an active and meaningful life.

Support for children placed in foster care

Children placed in foster care have a high risk of ill health, suicide, a lower level of education and long-term exclusion. It is the responsibility of the social welfare committees to ensure that placed children have access to adequate treatment, but despite this there is no municipally structured support for the target group. The vision within the project is that all children who are placed in family homes are offered needs-adapted support measures in addition to the actual placement of the social administration.

The digital twin of bullying - data-driven bullying prevention

Bullying has increased in recent years, and unfortunately there is a lack of effective efforts to reduce children's vulnerability on a large scale and the schools' security work looks very different. Despite this, research on how we prevent bullying is very developed and the success factor is about regularly conducting surveys and implementing active measures based on these. The project will create a completely new free school tool and a digital twin that enables data-driven prevention with precision for safe and inclusive school environments.

Below is the complete list of project that received funding: