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Description
In Gdynia and Gdansk, several community shops are operating that are engaged in charitable activities and support the residents’ social integration. However, their potential is not fully exploited. Our project aims to make community shops the basis for the development of a ‘welfare society’ to replace the ‘welfare state’, which faces many systemic obstacles. Therefore, is this project we want to increase the potential of community shops as places that counteract exclusion, promote local cooperation act as centres of social integration. We want to create a network of self-help and self-advocacy activists as well as advisory teams that will support the community shops’ development. In the first stage of the project we will investigate the social changes that have occurred due to the activities of existing community shops, and analyze their customers’ needs. In the second stage, we will create working groups and conduct trainings in self-advocacy and social cooperation. We will also identify social leaders who will act as community advocates. In the next stage, we will implement and test the proposed solutions, and then develop educational materials with guidelines on how to prevent exclusion and carry out self-help and self-advocacy activities. The project is addressed to people at risk of social exclusion, including people in various crises, experiencing exclusion, including digital exclusion, migrants,as well as employees of administration and CSR departments of companies.