SJD Social Innova is a cross-cutting programme of the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu (FSJD), designed to foster transformative social innovation across our social and healthcare ecosystem. We promote initiatives that generate measurable improvements in the lives of people in vulnerable situations, operating through a portfolio of projects structured around four key impact areas: Employability, Housing, Care, and Rights.
Using participatory approaches—such as co-creation and theory of change—Social Innova supports the entire innovation cycle, from identifying challenges to designing, implementing, and scaling solutions. This ensures tangible impact within Sant Joan de Déu centres and contributes to evidence-based public policies.
Our areas of impact
SJD Social Innova is structured around four key impact areas where social innovation can produce tangible societal benefits:
-
Employability – Promoting access to stable, meaningful work through skills development, formal and informal training, and pathways to employment for people facing barriers such as homelessness, disability, or migration.
-
Housing – Developing community-based and integrated models to prevent homelessness, improve living conditions, and enable long-term inclusion through secure housing solutions.
-
Care – Advancing person-centred care models that support long-term care needs, loneliness, mental health and wellbing (mainly services’ users and their families, but also professionals), and autonomy through integrated social and healthcare approaches
-
Rights – Advocating for social justice and equality by strengthening access to rights and services, reducing discrimination, and influencing public policies for inclusion and empowerment.
Across all four domains, Social Innova acts as a catalyst for systemic change, leveraging real-world evidence from a network of 15 centres in Eastern Spain. These centres co-develop and replicate solutions that contribute to European objectives for social resilience, fair transitions, and improved wellbeing.
Innovation infrastructure
At the heart of the programme lies the WeCare Co‑Lab, an ENoLL‑certified living lab that serves as our innovation and experimentation hub. WeCare Co‑Lab fosters collaborative environments for co-designing, piloting, and scaling solutions, engaging diverse stakeholders—including service users, practitioners, and researchers—to address complex social challenges. Through this dynamic, SJD Social Innova reinforces systemic transformation, promotes knowledge transfer, and positions Fundació Sant Joan de Déu as a European reference in social innovation.
Our institutional capacity
The research and innovation activities of Social Innova are managed by FSJD, a private non-profit research organisation founded in 2002. FSJD’s mission is to improve people’s health and wellbeing through the promotion, management, and support of research and innovation within the Sant Joan de Déu ecosystem. FSJD has extensive experience in managing EU‑funded projects: currently coordinating 11 and participating in 43 active projects (Horizon Europe, EU4Health, EIT Health, ESF+, Erasmus+, EJP, INTERREG, CERV, AMIF, among others) and over 20 international collaborations.
In the social field, FSJD has particvpate in 13 European projects and leads the ESF+ consortium COMHOM (GA 101172624), which seeks to transform Europe’s response to homelessness by improving the quality, efficiency, and personalisation of services.
Beyond the social domain, FSJD is also a partner in the Horizon Europe Co-funded European Partnership ERDERA – European Rare Diseases Research Alliance (Cluster 1), where it contributes to shaping the European research and innovation agenda on rare diseases. This participation has provided FSJD with first-hand experience in the governance, coordination, and implementation mechanisms typical of European Partnerships, including contributing to the co-definition of strategic research agendas, aligning national and European priorities, and facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration across countries and disciplines. Joining the Social Transformations and Resilience Partnership would allow us to build on this experience—transferring our knowledge of partnership governance, impact monitoring, and policy alignment to the social innovation domain, and linking real-world experimentation with systemic, EU-level transformation.