The SozialMarie 2020 was awarded to 15 excellent social innovations from Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia by the international expert jury.
This year we hosted an extraordinary virtual Award Ceremony as a livestream on 1 May instead of the public event in the ORF RadioKulturhaus. So for the first time we had unlimited virtual seats and an international audience that did not have to make the trip to Vienna. You can watch the video of the online award ceremony here.
Once again we are pleased about outstanding social innovations. Congratulations to the 15 award winning projects!
Main Prizes:
1. Prize (€15,000): Project Home, Slovakia
2. Prize (€10,000): Volkshilfe – Essential Child Support, Austria
3. Prize (€5,000): Print It Yourself!, Hungary
Prizes endowed with €2,000:
(F)Actually – A Myth Busting Website About History, Hungary
StoP – Neighbourhoods Without Partner Violence, Austria
Take Home Naloxone (THN) Pilot Project, Austria
Theatre With No Home, Slovakia
Transkript online – The Blind and Visually Impaired in Service for the Deaf, Czech Republic
Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum, Croatia
Visits in the Dark, Czech Republic
We Give Nets, Not Fish – but Eggs, Yes!, Hungary
Workshops Against Fear 2.0, Austria
This year we have five honorary patrons, who will each support one of the nominated or awarded projects for one year.
Herta Stockbauer is taking on the honorary protection for a nominated project from Austria: Care Leaver Mentoring.
Barbara Erős chooses a nominated project from Hungary for her honorary protection: Banyaerdő.
Petr Šmíd chooses the honorary protection for a nominated Czech project: Replug me.
Dušan Ondrušek takes over the honorary protection for a Slovakian prize-winning project: Theatre With No Home.
Nenad Maljković chooses a Croatian nominated project for his protection: Paint it Back.
Why they chose these projects is revealed in a video statement.
More information about the honorary patronage can be found here: www.sozialmarie.org/en/prize
This year, all 34 nominated projects took part in the public vote for the international Audience Award. The winner is TÁVSZEM – Remote Eye from Hungary, the project receives a financial support of €1,000 for further education and development of its choice.
Which 15 projects will be awarded with the SozialMarie this year? You can find out at our online Award Ceremony in the livestream!
Watch from the comfort of your couch as Barbara van Melle presents the 15 SozialMarie awards. We are also present and eagerly await your reactions.
On May 1 at 6:00 p.m. under this link: https://youtu.be/9FkDADHvkYU
With broadcast on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/SozialMarie
This time you don't have to register, there are unlimited seats ;-)
We are looking forward to you and your reactions to our livestream.
You have decided! The SozialMarie Audience Award goes to TÁVSZEM – Remote Eye from Hungary!
The project collected 1,761 votes in the online voting and wins a financial support of €1,000 for further education and development of its choice. Congratulations!
More information about the project: www.sozialmarie.org/en/projects/8005
This year a total of 12,139 votes were cast – that's a record for us, thanks for voting!
Will your favourite project be awarded one of the SozialMarie jury prizes? You can find out at our online Award Ceremony in the livestream!
Watch from the comfort of your couch as Barbara van Melle hands over the 15 prizes with Wanda Moser-Heindl.
On May 1 at 6:00 p.m. under this link: https://youtu.be/9FkDADHvkYU
With broadcast on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/SozialMarie
We look forward to seeing you and your reactions live at the Award Ceremony!
We have opened our new homepage! As every year, we will be granting an Audience Award in addition to the jury prizes.
Not only is our appearance new, but also the international Audience Award: There is a prize to one of the projects nominated for the SozialMarie 2020. This means that the audience chooses one of 34 projects.
What remains the same is that the Audience Award is determined solely by the audience via online voting, and that it is independent of the 15 jury prizes. The project with the most votes wins a €1,000 grant for further education and development of its choice.
It's your turn now! Vote for your favorite project from 23 April - 29 April (11:55 p.m.)!
- You can find all nominated projects at www.sozialmarie.org/en/projects.
- The nominations for 2020 are already preselected in the project filter. With the keyword search and other categories you can narrow down your selection even further.
- To vote for a project, open the project profile and click on the voting button.
- Enter your e-mail address.
- Open your e-mail inbox and confirm your vote by clicking on the link in the confirmation e-mail. If you did not receive an e-mail, wait a few minutes or check your spam folder.
- Only after clicking on this link your vote will be counted. This will be confirmed in a pop-up window.
One vote can be cast per e-mail address. We do not count the votes in case of manipulation attempts.
Would you like to collect votes for your favourite project? Then simply forward the direct link of the project profile by e-mail or on Facebook.
Sign up for our newsletter so that you can find out in good time who will win the Audience Award and whether your favourite project will also be awarded a jury prize on 1 May!
For the 16th time, SozialMarie – Prize for Social Innovation will be awarded to 15 outstanding projects on May 1. From almost 300 submissions, the expert jury nominated 34 projects from Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Slovakia for SozialMarie.
The nominations for SozialMarie 2020: www.sozialmarie.org/en/projects
Congratulations to the nominated projects! This year, these projects are most concerned with challenges in the areas of education, diversity, and social and health care. Let us inspire you!
Award Ceremony
From the nominations, 15 prize-winning projects will be awarded the SozialMarie at the public award ceremony on May 1 in the ORF RadioKulturhaus in Vienna and presented to the public. The first three prizes will be endowed with €15,000, €10,000 and €5,000 respectively, the other twelve prizes with €2,000 each.
At the award ceremony, inspiring personalities take on the active patronage for a nominated project of their choice and support it in the coming year.
The event is free of charge, places are limited. Please register at sozialmarie@sozialmarie.org by April 14, 2020.
- When? May 1, 2020, start at 6:00 p.m.
- Where? ORF RadioKulturhaus, Argentinierstraße 30a, 1040 Vienna, Austria
Audience Award
In order to shorten the waiting time until the award ceremony, SozialMarie offers an international Audience Award for the first time. At the beginning of April, an international audience decides by means of online voting which nominated project will receive financial support for educational and developmental purposes in the amount of €1,000. The Audience Award is independent of the 15 jury prizes.
A total of 288 projects were submitted for the 16th call for applications for the SozialMarie 2020 – Prize for Social Innovation: 101 from Austria, 77 from Hungary, 46 from Croatia, 45 from the Czech Republic and 19 from Slovakia.
The evaluation of the submissions has already begun. For more information on the selection procedure visit www.sozialmarie.org/en/selection-process.
Our jury of experts will nominate a maximum of 35 projects for SozialMarie, these will be announced at the beginning of March.
At the beginning of April the audience can decide by online voting which nominated project will win the Audience Award: The project with the most votes will receive a one-time funding of €1,000 for further development or training purposes of its choice (e.g. further education of the team or the project, coaching or participation in conferences).
On 1 May, 2020, at the public Award Ceremony in the ORF RadioKulturhaus in Vienna, 15 projects will be awarded the SozialMarie. The first three prizes will be endowed with €15,000, €10,000 and €5,000, further twelve prizes each with €2,000. Further information about the SozialMarie Award can be found here. Registrations for the award ceremony are possible from March.
The call for proposals for SozialMarie is looking for excellent social innovations in Central and Eastern Europe. Projects can still be submitted until 21 January 2020, all information on the call can be found here: www.sozialmarie.org/en/call-for-applications.
"SozialMarie is a prize for successfully implemented social innovative projects."
What all follows from this definition? János Czafrangó, SozialMarie patron in Hungary, helps with some tips for the submission.
Since SozialMarie is a prize, it is a kind of competition, and if it is a competition, then the "submission" is actually an application. Although players usually register for sports competitions, the analogy here also fits in the sense that the prerequisite for participation in international sports competitions is good performance, and this also applies to SozialMarie, since only innovations that have already been realized can participate in the competition.
Those who decide to start have actually already made their first self-assessment and decided that their program or project is so strong that it will stand up to the innovation competition!
And how can this strength be tested in advance? During the preparatory workshops in Budapest there was an exercise for two, where the participants had to interview each other about the others' project and then briefly present it. Great results were achieved and this is proof that a good "foreign" eye and ear can be very useful! My advice is not to start the work by filling out the submission form, but to ask some people who know your project first:
To what extent and why do they consider your project innovative and what would they highlight if they had the opportunity to present it in a few sentences? You can easily check in advance how you meet the Criteria for Social Innovation for the call for proposals by looking at a total of 16 (!) SozialMarie criteria, divided into four groups.
Before you start filling out the form, you should also consider what makes your program different from similar programs and why you think it is special? You should also determine in advance how you can substantiate that your program has achieved the intended social impacts?
And remember: It is not organisations but projects or programmes that compete with each other, so the presentation should also focus on that! However, if you want to introduce a very short presentation of your organisation, make use of the fact that you (or your predecessors) have already worked hard in the foundation charter to present it in short sentences, which you can also use here :-)
I wish you a good application!
With kind regards,
János Czafrangó
SozialMarie patron 2019 in Hungary
The Zagreb 041 football club, which is actively committed to integration through sport, received a 2,000 Euro Prize in May. Starting this year, projects from all over Croatia will get a chance to win the SozialMarie. Branimir Šloser from Zagreb 041 talks to our coordinator for Croatia, Ivana Perica, about what counts as innovation.
Ivana Perica: Given the deadlocked rules that govern professional football, the dominating power hierarchies and money transactions that push sport itself into the background, what is the innovative element in Zagreb 041? How do you bring the game and the participants – not only the footballers, but all of them, including the fans and the ordinary spectators – back into the foreground?
Branimir Šloser: In our club all members are included: In the form of working groups, all of us – players, coaches, fans and parents of the children training with us – have the same right to have a say when it comes to brainstorming and planning future projects, and generally determining the course of the entire club. These working groups enjoy a high degree of autonomy so that they can determine their own development and plans. As far as we know, there is no second football club in Croatia that functions according to these or similar principles. Our aim is to change the negative image that almost everyone has of football, the fans and also the integration of the refugees. Our example shows that there are other ways.
IP: How do you deal with hate speech, which apparently is not only negatively determined by Croatian football, but is tacitly allowed in all stadiums of the world?
BŠ: From the beginning, tirelessly, we stand openly and loudly against all forms of discrimination. This is what guides our way of working in the association, but it does more than that. Hate speech, which we have met with opponent clubs and their fans, is consistently recorded in our minutes. We have also had those responsible punished, which is probably a precedent in football at the level at which we play.
IP: How do you assess your role and impact in the national and international context?
BŠ: We network with a number of related football clubs from Europe (Scotland, Italy, Germany, England). What unites us is the fight against discrimination and all these clubs work together and actively involve disadvantaged social groups. We cannot develop this kind of cooperation with football clubs from Croatia or the region because, to our knowledge, related clubs currently do not exist. To this end, however, we cooperate with numerous civil society organisations, some of which are quite different in their orientation, which deal with issues such as human rights, environmental protection, humanitarian aid and religion. We see our strength in the diversity of these partners and these cooperations. We are also connected to neighbouring schools, which are visited by the members of the association. In particular, there are those schools that have accepted refugee children and whose specialists help us to monitor the development and well-being of our children and to assist them as much as possible. At the moment we are drawing up plans on how our model could be transferred to other contexts. In this sense, we are developing a future cooperation with a Roma youth organisation.
For more information about Zagreb 041: Football for All click here.
We open the tender for SozialMarie for the 16th time and once again embark on the search for excellent social innovations in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the past 15 years, SozialMarie has created a good basis for cooperation outside Austria in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This year we venture one step further and include the whole of Croatia in the submission area.
"Finally the whole of Croatia is part of SozialMarie. So far only projects could submit, which were not more than 300 km away from Vienna, now nevertheless some new regions were added. Innovative projects from Croatia, submit!"
Wanda Moser-Heindl, founder of Unruhe Privatstiftung
All information about the call: www.sozialmarie.org/en/call-for-applications