Social Label part of the lecture INCUBATE conference

Good stories provide meaning, direction and new solutions for social changes. Researcher Kristel Zegers asked Social label to give a presentation as part of her lecture for the Incubate Conference on friday 20 September.

Why ‘Social Label’?

To discover and develop the individual qualities are important policy themes for the government and institutes in health. Art and culture are able to contribute. Creating something of special value, creating products that matter, products that are valued for their functional and aesthetic value is important to all of us, especially to people with a distance to the labour market. That’s what we call: ´Socio economics´.

Our world is changing rapidly. In our own environment, lets say The Netherlands, you can’t miss the signals given by the government. Budget cuts, decentralization to local or regional government, accompanied by decreased budgets. It’s obvious is the health sector, for example daily activities for elder people.

Of course: people are not waiting for something to happen. The Dutch initiate new opportunities. One of them is really new and can be found in Brabant: Social Label.

What is ‘Social Label’?

Social Label is a new concept for work and daily activities for people with a ‘distance to the labour market’. Art and care are combined in this initiative in order to create new product lines. In each of the lines the social welfare workers will have an exclusive bond with a renowned designer. These products will be produced, presented and sold by workers in different social workforce centers.

The designer enlarges his or her portfolio with a very special cooperation, moving a value based approach centre stage addressing human dignity, slow design, attention and time.

Social Label is an initiative of Amarant Group, Studio Boot and C-mone (Articipate!). They explicitly invite others to contribute and cooperate in order to brigdge the gap of some of us to the labour market.