<< Background >>The economic and social integration of migrant population was only starting to show positive trends by 2019; for instance, the immigrant unemployment rate in the European Union decreased below 10% in 2019 and was only less than 4 percentage points higher than the one of native-born. Nonetheless, COVID-19 has reverted this trend, jeopardising years of virtuous inclusion policies and hitting already vulnerable populations which are left outside of mainstream support services. Indeed, The recent dramatic developments of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to an unprecedented economic and social crisis in our times, and while we are yet to be confronted with its long-termconsequences, we have already started to appreciate the role of migrants in the functioning of our economies. As reported in the latest International Migration Outlook (OECD,2020), during the lock-down and beyond, migrants played a pivotal role in essential activities such as health care, agriculture, food retail and cleaning. On the other hand, they have also been disproportionately exposed to the economic consequences - working mainly on temporary contracts without social entitlements in the event of job or income loss (Scarpetta et al., 2020)For these reasons, WE-CAN aims at using social innovation as a way of countering this trend, by providing a hybrid collaborative space among different actors to support the creation of alternative narratives in terms of socio-economic inclusion. The main target of the project are unemployed migrants who will be activated and stimulated to use their skills and ideas to either start a social enterprise or to act as gatekeepers, by playing the role of community navigators. In either case, the reason is to unlock opportunities for meaningful inclusion to happen, by tapping into the transformative power of adult learning and into the collaborative support networks both at a local and at an international level. In particular, in the case of social entrepreneurship, it is widely recognised that self-employment can be an effective way to bounce back from an economic crisis and it becomes particularly relevant if it addresses existing social and/or sustainability issues and if it is able to fill market gaps. On the other hand, in the case of community navigators, their role is is thought to plug gaps in standardised (and therefore less flexible) or underfunded systems of mainstream support and is essential to reach the most vulnerable populations.<< Objectives >>Following the recommendations in the EC Action Plan on the integration of third country nationals (2016) and the EC Action plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021-2027 (2020), WE-CAN aims to encourage migrant inclusion by means of social entrepreneurship and community development through tailored social innovation training and mentoring, developed thanks to a cooperation among stakeholders and experts coming from different sectors and countries.In particular, the specific objectives (SOs) are to: share experiences, information and best practices in terms of socio-economic inclusion for migrants, paying special attention to migrant women. This SO will be achieved building an international multi-stakeholder platform; jointly identify the market gaps and the challenges that the project will contribute to address and activate soft and project management competencies through an activation programme (lasting 30 hours), an incubation programme (80 hours) and hackathons aimed to enhance the skills of the project participants; promote migrant entrepreneurial endeavours as a response to identified market gaps and launch community engagement actions aimed at improving their socio-economic inclusion, sense of belonging and interaction with local communities; establish the role of community navigators, thus to maximise the use of available socio-economic opportunities and create new ones. The programme will be piloted with migrants in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Germany, in order to test its effectiveness and will also be shared with key stakeholders at the national level ensuring their understanding, adoption and recommendation of the platform within key learning environments (job centres, learning institutes, cooperatives etc).<< Implementation >>WE-CAN aims to create a well-structured and possibly long-lasting inspiring and empowering environment for its participants; to reach this goal will propose and adopt an incremental path of involvement and activation, to follow and implement the common thre underlying its various phases. Participants will be supported by local multi-stakeholders platforms established in the first task, among which the coaches and mentors will be selected, and their activities will be targeting market gaps identified through a local review. Following these tasks, there will be a comprehensive selection of participants, who will be then involved in the capacity building through the common phases of activation (task 2.2) and explore (task 2.3) and the specialised track either for social entrepreneurship (task 3.1 and 3.2) or community navigators (tasks 4.1 and 4.2). This training will give them the necessary capacities and boost their social/creative attitudes in order to engage with social innovation; in particular, this phase will provide them with new or revised tools to start re-shaping their personal and professional profile as well as boosting their life skills. Relevantly, they will also be digitally up-skilled - i.e. provided with lessons and insights on the use and importance of basic spreadsheets, presentation and text files, social media platforms and networks, online branding, “digital” profiles for public presentation, opportunities and threats within use of social media, the role of influencers and fake news. It is to report that this capacity-building path will count upon the involvement of members of the multi-stakeholders platforms as additional trainers and mentors for specific sessions. In practical terms, the content of such a training path will increasingly make the participants prepared for the societal and labor market they will face during and after the project in each of the professional pathways chosen. After the capacity-building activities, participants will be actively involved in the engagement campaigns (tasks 3.3) and in the networking labs (task 4.3), opportunities to test their acquired knowledge, share their competencies, ideas and work and boost their employment opportunities. This will also be a chance to open up to local communities, in a two-way process of local needs’ fulfillment and mutual enrichment. Therefore, participants in the project will also play a key role in the implementation of the dissemination activities as they will be the main actors of the engagement and networking local activities, where they will have the possibility to present to a wider public the results of the project. Finally a Curriculum for the role of Social entrepreneurs and for the role of Community navigators will be published.<< Results >>The project aims at seizing the integration capacity that stems from the interaction between different members of a community, working together to find solutions for the common problems they share in a given territory. This constitutes one of the main pillars of WE-CAN that will be designed and tested in the implementation sites. The second outcome of the project focuses on enhancing the entrepreneurial capacities of migrants as active members in their communities and empower their role in the society. Through a training support mechanism, the participants will reinforce their skills to pursue alternative pathways and innovative solutions to common challenges in their host territories. The whole mechanism foresees different occasions of collaboration between the participants and the receiving communities (represented by citizens, local authorities, NGOs, CSOs, companies, etc.), which will have, as an indirect outcome, a reduction of the cultural and social barriers between the different groups, and a stronger sense of belonging and integration within the host society. Contextually, to strengthen this collaboration, the community navigator role will be introduced and taken up by some of the participants who will be trained to implement an asset-based approach to socio-economic inclusion and community welfare by recognising the roles, talent, and expertise of their fellows, via innovative and non-formal experiences. In this way, they will not only contribute to solving social and green challenges, but they will also enhance soft skills pivotal to improve their (self-)employability opportunities. Furthermore, by providing a toolbox of information about social and sustainable entrepreneurship, even the migrants who will not wish to pursue the entrepreneurship career, they will gain practical knowledge to be used at a later stage or to be transferred to other sectors. From a broader perspective, another expected outcome is the creation of a European-wide multi-stakeholder platform and the certification of the role of community navigator with a special focus on migration. Indeed, the project has been conceived for being carried out and implemented at two levels: a European one, where partners will exchange knowledge, transfer practices and ensure creation of a coherent and impactful EU capacity-building and empowerment model, anda local one, where each partner will design and deliver a new methodology of inclusion of migrants as a practice to be included in formal and non-formal integration measures and mechanisms.In terms of results, the project is set to achieve the creation of two pathways of socio-economic inclusion whose scaling is supported by a dedicated curriculum and by the presence of national multi-stakeholder platforms which will be pivotal in ensuring the long-term sustainability of the results and their integration in policy-making.