Social Enterprise Puzzle is participating in the European Project Erasmus+ KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – SKILLS II

The duration of the project is 36 month and it is a co-operation between 8 organisations from 6 countries. SKILLS II aims to improving skills and changing lives through self-directed support. The main purpose of the disability services is to gain social inclusion and equal citizenship for persons with disabilities. Yet often persons with disabilities experience that either the support systems are not supporting individual choices, staff working in disability services do not have the needed skills to support people individually or that managers/leading social workers/community leaders lack the skills and competencies in promoting the change in their organisations. Many persons with disabilities are still forced to passively accept the services and support they are offered even if that kind of support and services are not suitable for them. Self-Directed Support is an existing mechanism for persons with disabilities to gain more control and freedom on choice in their everyday life, but it is not widely used in Europe, even though it is proven to be an efficient way for persons with disabilities and organisations to organize services in person-centered way. This is why we need cultural, social and leadership change so that persons with disabilities can have real opportunities for change in their everyday lives. The project will help people use and further develop the current self-directed support learning materials and in particular:

– Help people translate and adapt them for different countries

– Establish interactive e-learning modules In addition, and with the target of increasing demand for the primary learning on self-directed support we will work with:

– Social workers who assess needs and develop support solutions

– Managers in service providers who can adapt their way of working to support self-direction

– System leaders who can increase the opportunity for people to use self-directed support

The main objective of SKILLS 2 is to advance and strengthen learning about self-directed support by increasing the capacity of systems to offer self-directed support and the demand for self-directed support from across the communities of Europe. The final beneficiaries of the project will be persons with disabilities.