Partners to Achieve Local Sustainability

ended

Nowadays, in a complex, competitive and volatile business environment, the adoption of sustainability principles is of utmost importance for a steady and sustainable growth of SMEs and, to a large extent, their survival depends on it. In order to successfully integrate sustainability principles and practices within the SME business culture, SMEs should understand the emerging opportunities and the relevance to them. Although there are CSOs with wide experience and high level of proficiency in sustainability that could offer guidance on this, they do not naturally cooperate with SMEs. To overcome this challenge, Sustain-PALS consortium, equipped to stimulate collaboration and pass on adequate skills, will play a key role in supporting the sustainability process of SMEs through a capacity-building process and a coaching programme towards more sustainable business models. In particular, Sustain-PALS will map all the regional environmental and social CSOs and will contribute to the challenge of harnessing the expertise of CSOs to assist SMEs in their transition towards sustainability by setting the stage to foster effective partnerships between 6 SMEs and 2 relevant environmental and social CSOs in the region of Extremadura (Spain) through open dialogue, exchange and joint identification of sustainability challenges and opportunities. Moreover, technical training on future trends and funding options as well as on sustainability-related topics such as sustainable business models aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals will be provided through a MOOC platform. For addressing the adoption of sustainable business models, Sustain-PALS will assess status quo in leveraging sustainability to drive growth of the partner SMEs, design future scenarios to allow SMEs gaining immediate insights into untapped potentials and prioritise improvement areas, and propose a targeted action plan to increase their sustainability performance and measure impact in the medium-term.