HECSOs aims at improving Universities’ capacities to cooperate with Civil Society Organizations systematically and continuously on community engagement as an innovative and impactful way for socio-economic inclusion of people in need.

The project will be implemented by 8 partners (4 Universities and 4 CSOs) from 6 EU countries (Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Italia, Romania, Spain), with the support of a European CSOs network, 2 Universities and 2 CSOs as associated partners. The project partners will cooperate for 3 years towards the following Specific Objectives.

The project consortium has established a trans-disciplinary and collaborative research group and develop international and research-based learning approaches to identify and disseminate innovative and evidence-based models of intervention and related implementation tools. The project consortium will also identify relevant professional roles that make community engagement approaches more effective and impactful, it will co-design corresponding skills and competency frameworks and develop related training (up-skilling)  curricula and courses for students and CSOs professionals. Finally, the project partners will develop, through jointly-organised local policy multi-stakeholders workshops, guidelines and policy recommendations to enable environments that favour community engagement approaches HECSOs is funded by the European Union in the framework of Erasmus + Key Action 2 – Cooperation among organisations and institutions.