As you know, we like sharing what we do to advance research but, most of all, we love when those who make this research community a reality share their impressions with us. This is the case for the meeting we held in Budapest last week as part of the Empower-SE Action. The representative of the Czech Republic in the Action and long-term friend of EMES, Nadia Johanisova, has put in writing her impressions, which we share with you below. Enjoy the reading!

The meeting of the COST EMPOWER-SE project in Budapest, 16 and 17 January 2019, had a very good energy, and I am glad I took part. I had only a vague idea of what this COST project entails (despite being a country representative on the Management Committee) before I came. The meeting made everything come alive, as it were, and now I feel a part of the group and it makes sense.

This is in large measure due to the skills of Rocío Nogales, the Communication Officer of the project (or Action, as it is called) and also to Marthe Nyssens, the Chair of the Action. Together with our Hungarian hosts, they collaborated admirably, and steered us though a demanding two days with organisational savoir faire and a talent for deciphering for us even the most abstruse EU terms and regulations.

I could feel a large level of trust among the participants in the cooordination activities of the organisers, plus unusual dedication of the co-ordinators to the ideas and goals behind the project. This shone out plainly through their energy and work. The atmosphere was friendly and inclusive. From what I know and hear, this is not always so in other projects and communities.

The hosts of this meeting, our Hungarian colleagues from the Budapest Corvinus University, invited an impressive array of speakers not only from the Business School of the University, where a lot of the scholarship involving social enterprise takes place, but also from other departments of the University and from other institutions, both academic and non-academic. We had a chance to really see what is happening on the ground, here and now and in practice in the sphere of Hungarian social enterprises, and meet and talk to their representatives and to researchers. This was valuable for me, considering that Hungary is quite close to my own country, the Czech Republic. At the same time, people from dozens of other European countries mingled and talked, sometimes finding unexpected synergies in their work and outlook.

See some of you soon perhaps at another EMPOWER-SE COST meeting or event!