That's a wrap! - featuring the SIBdev project milestones & the extended summary video

Let’s start with the inventory of the milestones: the cities initially embarking on the adventure of exploring Social Impact Bonds came together in Heerlen, The Netherlands in 2019 March to kick-off the Phase 1 of their joint work. Phase 1 was a 1-year period, in which the Lead Partner and the Lead Expert visited all cities to get to know them and their motivation and scope for the project. By the end of this time the Expert was ready to judge which cities had the resources to dive into the topic and could decide on the final composition of the network entering Phase 2, also gained enough information on the cities in context to the subject to prepare the Baseline Study, a paper describing the status quo and setting the objectives and methodology for Phase 2. The Phase 1 Final event was held in Fundao, Portugal in January 2020; where the network could meet for the 2nd time and decided to continue without 2 cities who proved to have insufficient resources for the joint work.

As for all it is, the upcoming 2 years of Phase 2 was an intensive ride! The cities needed to build up a solid knowledge pool on the topic of outcome-based contracting and social impact bonds, for this we created the Masterclasses. Masterclasses were our very own Master Programme in SIBs, as Maria Chiara Pizzorno concluded at the end – she was the organizer of the Masterclasses as expert on the topic. Do you remember we said Phase 2 started in January 2020? Something else also hit the world at this moment… the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic gave us challenges, as Masterclasses, along with the Transnational Meetings and related study visits were planned with physical presence – now we needed to work out methods for online work. Altogether 6 Masterclasses were held in the project, half of which was held online. At this point we needed to involve another ad-hoc expert: Katalin Bunyevácz helped us to design the learning process in the digital world. The Masterclasses were put together combining presentations and case studies from experts, workshops to deepen the knowledge gained and sharing of related good practices by partners. Maria Chiara Pizzorno, responsible for the Masterclasses prepared Essays after each summarizing the results, which you can find in our Library.

As the knowledge was building up, partners started its transfer on all levels: among each other during the Transnational Meetings and towards their own stakeholders in frames of the Urbact Local Group meetings. The conductor of this knowledge exchange was the Lead Expert, whose role in the project is to make sure that the knowledge transfer is maximized on all levels, following the URBACT principles. COVID reinforced the network to go online in the beginning, thus the Activation Meeting of Phase 2 was held online in September 2020, setting the timeline for the joint work. Three more transnational meeting followed, alternating with the Masterclasses by the time the Partnership could meet again in real life: one year later in September 2021 most of them travelled to Estonia to have our first hybrid meeting, with mixed physical and digital attendance by both participants and presenters, including a Masterclass. You all know rewarding it is to meet in person after long lock-down, and we decided to continue this way despite some partners being online and thus holding hybrid meetings. So SIBdev network met up five more times before going altogether to Heerlen, The Netherlands in May 2022 for the Final Meeting. The meetings’ atmosphere is captured in our SIBdev Family videos, which we published previously in the article ‘SIBdev Family memories for happily ever after’.

Meanwhile the local aspect wasn’t put behind neither, the work with the Urban Local Groups (ULG) had been initiated already in Phase 1 with one meeting, and it continued in Phase 2 as well altering with the Transnational Meetings to provide the knowledge transfer between the transnational and the local level. Each city had minimum 7 ULG meetings between May 2020 and August 2022, most of them even more than that! The goal of the ULG work is to prepare an Integrated Action Plan (IAP), a strategy document outlining the steps of a SIB creation for the topic identified at the beginning of the project. City representatives with the help of an ULG coordinator and facilitation techniques worked to prepare the IAP and meanwhile had the room for experimenting with ideas in the frame of Small Scale Actions. Small Scale Actions (SSA) are small pilots, designed to let the city try out some of their ideas created together with the ULG, so as the IAP can be built on actual experiences. The cities all prepared videos on their SSAs, which are uploaded on our YouTube Channel and are featured in our earlier articles – go check them out! With the above method, all IAPs were ready by the summer of 2022, and they can all be found in English in our Library.

The above summary is just an inventory of the activities conducted, but one photo is worth thousand words, isn’t so? At our Final Meeting in May 2022 in Heerlen we prepared a summary video of the project, where participants tell about their experiences in their own worlds, giving real stories behind the facts and numbers.

We invite you to check out this summary video with us, hopefully it conveys all the joy we had during our project!