Co-Founded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union
SCOPE is a European project helping social sector managers in France, Greece, Italy, and Spain lead sustainably and effectively.
The social work sector across Europe is facing a quiet but serious crisis. It isn't a crisis of purpose, but of people. Attracting qualified professionals, retaining experienced managers, and ensuring that those who lead social care organisations can do so sustainably has become one of the defining challenges of the field.
SCOPE (Support Change Of Paradigms for life balances) is an Erasmus+ funded project that takes this challenge seriously. Bringing together four organisations from France, Greece, Italy, and Spain, SCOPE works at the intersection of professional practice, academic research, and vocational training to build something the sector urgently needs: a structured, replicable model for supporting managers in social and medico-social organisations.
What SCOPE is about
The core idea behind SCOPE is a virtuous circle. Managers bring knowledge from the field: lived experience of what works, what doesn't, and what the real challenges look like from the inside. Researchers contribute analytical frameworks and evidence. Trainers provide the tools to translate insight into transferable skills. SCOPE creates the spaces where these three perspectives meet, learn from each other, and produce something none of them could achieve alone.
The project doesn't start from scratch. It builds on existing innovations, draws on accumulated experience across partner countries, and co-constructs resources designed to be useful in practice, not just sound in theory.
What SCOPE will produce
By the end of the project, SCOPE will deliver three concrete outputs. The first is a collaborative research-action model, built around the real challenges faced by managers in the social sector and developed through structured inquiry involving both trainee and experienced managers alongside researchers and trainers. The second is a digital toolbox, comprising a SCOPE MOOC and YouTube channel, offering documentary, methodological, and training resources that managers can access independently. The third is a reflective and collaborative training module designed to help managers analyse their own individual and organisational positioning, develop adaptive managerial strategies, and build a sustainable relationship between their professional responsibilities and personal wellbeing.
The partnership
SCOPE is coordinated by ANRAS (France), one of the largest social action organisations in southern France, with over 2,600 staff, 83 facilities, and decades of experience in child protection, disability services, elderly care, and social cohesion. Alongside ANRAS, the consortium brings together Alpha Omega Research & Consulting (Greece), leading the project's research-action work package, CIDAS Social Cooperative (Italy), and the Universitat de Barcelona (Spain). Together, the four partners combine field expertise, research capacity, and cross-national perspective across four European countries.
SCOPE — Work Package 2: Research-Action Spaces, led by Alpha Omega Research & Consulting
At the heart of the SCOPE project lies a methodological conviction: the knowledge needed to transform the social work sector already exists, within the experience of the people working in it. What is missing is a structured process for surfacing that knowledge, connecting it with research, and turning it into transferable learning. Work Package 2 is where that process takes shape.
What WP2 does
WP2, Research-Action Spaces, is the investigative and co-creative core of SCOPE. Led by Alpha Omega Research & Consulting, it designs and implements a research-action methodology involving three groups whose perspectives are too rarely brought together: managers currently working in social sector organisations (both experienced and in training), academic researchers and university professionals, and vocational trainers.
The starting point is not a predefined curriculum or a fixed set of answers, but a set of genuine questions: what makes management in the social sector difficult, what strategies help, and what the sector could look like if its leaders were better supported. WP2 creates the conditions for those questions to be explored rigorously and collaboratively.
How it works
The research-action spaces developed in WP2 are structured processes of collective inquiry. Participants do not simply receive information; they contribute to producing it. Through facilitated dialogue, structured reflection, and cross-national exchange, managers articulate their challenges, researchers offer analytical frameworks, and trainers identify what can be built from what emerges.
The findings from WP2 are not an end in themselves. They feed directly into WP3, which will translate them into the SCOPE digital toolbox, and into WP4, which will use them as the foundation for the training and awareness module. WP2 is, in this sense, the knowledge engine of the entire project.
Alpha Omega's role
Alpha Omega Research & Consulting brings to WP2 a combination of research expertise, cross-sectoral experience, and a track record in participatory and action-research methodologies developed through European projects spanning education, social inclusion, environmental action, and digital transformation. Leading WP2 means not only designing and facilitating the research-action process, but also ensuring that its outcomes are genuinely grounded in the realities of the field, analytically sound, and practically useful for the outputs that follow.
