On January 20th, SEE delegation (Juan Antonio Pedreño, Patrizia Bussi and Victor Meseguer) met Commissioner Thyssen, responsible for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility.

Commissioner Thyssen underlined that the Commission has paid close attention to the requests from the Member States, the Parliament, the EESC, GECES and the social economy’s representative organisations. Thus, she stressed that the Commission is fully committed to support the further development of social economy enterprises in Europe. In the same way, she explained that she will continue working with Commissioner Bieńkowska on an Action Plan for the social economy and, particularly, for social enterprises.

Ms. Thyssen emphasised that concrete actions to boost quality jobs creation by social economy enterprises, to increase the visibility of social economy entrepreneurship models, or to improve their access to finance and EU funding, cannot wait. Consequently, the Start-up and Scale-up Initiative adopted by the Commission in November, includes actions in favour of the social economy; and decided to use a further EFSI contribution to complement the EU programme for Employment and Social Innovation (EaSI) financial instruments for social enterprises and microfinance, and help it increase from 193 million euro to about one billion euro.