Within the ACE²-EU Alliance, the SPACE Centre (Societal Partnerships and Cultural Engagement Centre) serves as a hub for collaboration between universities and society. Its mission is to transform knowledge into action, fostering projects that address real-world societal challenges. One of the main initiatives of SPACE Centre is Social Impactors – interdisciplinary teams of students, experts, and practitioners working together to create tangible social impact across local communities and European society.
The SPACE Centre is proud to formally introduce its Social Impactors, one of its two operational units.
The ACE²-EU Societal Partnerships and Cultural Engagement (SPACE) Centre has reached a significant milestone with the official establishment of the Social Impactors (SI), one of its two operational units with the Culture Hub. The launch strengthens the Alliance’s role in supporting external stakeholders and local communities, as well as connecting academic excellence with regional and European priorities, to tackle current and future real-world socio-economic challenges.
The Social Impactors are dynamic consortia that bring together experts, practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders, to mobilise the Alliance’s knowledge and expertise in service to society. Operating as “think-and-do tanks”, they focus on knowledge creation, networking, sharing good practices, advocacy, and implementing activities with measurable impact.
Built on a quadruple-helix model of innovation, the Social Impactors engage stakeholders across:
• Academia (Alliance staff and students)
• Business and industry
• (Local) government
• Civil society (NGOs, associations, etc.).
This diverse and participatory structure ensures that teams respond directly to real-life and community needs and deliver practical, impactful solutions. Activities to take the Social Impactors into action will include: Knowledge Creation Team Workshops (face-to-face workshops to make the members meet in person and work on developing projects and activities); the Change Maker Ambassador Programme (training for students and staff of the alliance to become social change agents); and the Social Impactors Volunteering Programme (8-day volunteering opportunities at Alliance external partners for students to work on socio-economic issues).
The SI teams work is guided by principles of inclusivity, intersectionality, and inter- and transdisciplinarity, promoting collaboration across fields and prioritising actions that support minorities and vulnerable groups, while recognising how multiple forms of disadvantage and inequality intersect and overlap, creating barriers for marginalised groups and communities.
The SPACE Centre, as the virtual SI “home”, has set up four interconnected Social Impactors, following a participatory research methodology that included workshops replicated across all Alliance partners and an inter-university, interdisciplinary interpretation of results. Additional Social Impactors may be launched over time in response to emerging needs. The current four Social Impactors are:
• Culture & Diversity: chaired by Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (CUAS, Austria). This Social Impactor focuses on multi-, inter- and transculturalism, explores the meaning(s) of culture, including for instance subcultures and countercultures, and addresses diversity in a broad sense.
• Social Well-Being: chaired by the Santarém Polytechnic University (IPS, Portugal). This Social Impactor tackles the place of social well-being within health; considers both objective and subjective dimensions, with an understanding that subjective social well-being is easier to influence at the SI scale; and highlights components such as social relations, culture and society, and policy and governance.
• Respect & Dignity: chaired by the University Francisco de Vitoria (UFV, Spain). This Social Impactor is grounded in a more philosophical and anthropological basis: a justification for why human beings possess inherent worth and how that worth is construed and lived in society, including components such as interpersonal relations, group identity and sense of belonging. It is deeply rooted in a human rights perspective.
• Gender Equity: chaired by the Latvian Academy of Culture (LAC, Latvia). This Social Impactor targets the needs of people of all genders, advancing both perspectives of gender equality and equity. The latter approach goes further by recognising that equitable approaches tailor support to different needs rather than assuming identical treatment is sufficient, ignoring specificities and circumstances.
The Social Impactors are flexible, operating both at the local level and across the Alliance, and welcome participation from interested stakeholders that suits their availability and interests. To learn more or get involved, please reach out to the ACE²-EU team at your home university.
