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Co-operation, innovation and participation: E3M and Suara Learning Exchange

Publication date: 1st August 2024 |Categories: Exchange, Publications
  • E3M members visited Suara’s headquarters and projects throughout Barcelona and Catalonia, focusing on four key service areas: elderly care, homelessness, nurseries (including early years care) and youth provision.
  • Suara’s delegation visited E3M members delivering public services across the UK.
  • Mutual support, learning and co-operation accelerate our shared purpose of transforming people’s wellbeing.
  • Read the report (12 page pdf) and watch the short film below.

Barcelona-based Suara Cooperativa serves more than 40,000 people, providing caring services with a mission of social transformation. An employee-led co-operative, people, innovation and partnership are at the heart of its approach.

What can those delivering, commissioning and investing in public services in the UK learn from Suara? What can Suara learn from the UK’s mature social enterprises, co-operatives, mutuals, leisure trusts, employee-owned businesses and trading charities involved in public service delivery?

This learning exchange broke new ground. E3M members in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London hosted 23 members of Suara over three days. Then 25 UK social enterprise leaders, social investors and E3M partners visited Suara and some of its services in Catalonia.

Participants returned to Catalonia and the UK with new perspectives and ideas, many of which they are already embedding into their organisations.

This short report and accompanying suite of 18 video interviews reveal the key learning points.