The project, which started in October 2024, aims to support the sustainable and inclusive development of European rural areas by promoting social well-being and inclusion of rural dwellers and groups in a vulnerable situation and enhancing governance frameworks in rural areas. In particular, the project contributes to advancing in a multi-dimensional way the concept of social inclusion in rural areas, and supports access to high-quality social services by rural citizens through a series of awareness-raising, capacity-building, and pilot deployment activities that focus on social entrepreneurship and improvement of social services in a set of 7 different pilot territories (e.g., coastal, rural, peri-urban, mountainous). To realise its objectives, the project provides a novel territorial typology of rural areas, sets up and operationalises 7 “Smart Village labs”, and enhances governance frameworks and informed policy-making through E-Democracy and user-innovation techniques, to eventually deliver a dedicated Rural Social Inclusion Policy Dashboard.

You can find resources, news and more info on the project website.