In the context of EFPSA, ‘Social Impact’ refers to an initiative aiming to make use of psychological knowledge in order to have a positive and significant impact on society. The initiative was introduced into the portfolio of EFPSA’s activities in April 2013, and the Social Impact Initiative Team (SII-Team) has been working on six distinct projects in order to reach their aims. The main three projects are: “Mind the Mind – to Combat the Stigma of Mental Disorders”, which is the biggest of them all; “Organised Acts of Kindness”, “Better Together”,“(A)live!”, and“PlanetA”.
Through an enthusiastic network of psychology students, activists and friends of EFPSA, we hope to reach as many people as possible, raise awareness, educate, find support and advocate topics we consider important to the European community. The Social Impact Initiative Team works over a mandate of one year and consists of a Coordinator, five Project Responsibles, Team Members, and an Image as well as Data Management Responsible.
You can follow our work and progress on the following social media pages:
A Brief History of the Social Impact Initiative – an EFPSA service
Officially, the Social Impact Initiative was launched at the 27th annual EFPSA Congress in April 2013 in Izmir, Turkey, when the General Assembly of the Congress approved the introduction of the Social Impact Task Force.
During the Joint Executive Board and Member Representatives meeting in 2013, a workshop was organised where possible topics of Social Impact were brainstormed and discussed. It was eventually decided that the work would revolve around tackling the problem of stigma of mental disorders. The Task Force members conducted detailed research on the topic and reviewed the literature, which led to the composition and publishing of a Position Paper. One year later, the Task Force developed into a team within EFPSA, led by the Senior Coordinator. After having decided that an anti-stigma campaign would be the best way to make a positive influence on society, “Mind the Mind – To Combat the Stigma Of Mental Disorders” was launched.
At the same time as the team conducted research for the campaign, the Task Force was working on the support for the “Open Access Movement” and “Right to Research Coalition (R2RC)”, in order to raise awareness of Open Access. The project provided information on access to scientific research literature for students and young researchers and promoted advocacy of Open Access publishing. The team worked closely together with Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS) and brought a number of texts explaining the issues published in JEPS Bulletin. Another project of the team collected the data on how accessible research is in different European countries. The activity of the team was concluded since the topic is much better covered and students are usually well aware of it and universities often promote some kind of open access strategy themselves.
During the Joint Executive Board and Member Representatives Meeting in 2015, the team started brainstorming ideas for another project. The idea was to cover another field of psychology besides clinical and research one. The “Organised Acts of Kindness” is a project focused on encouraging people to do good deeds on a daily basis which will ultimately have a positive impact on them and society.
During the summer of 2016 the team collaborated with EFPSA’s Training Office to apply for a European Youth Foundation grant on the topic of empowering youth towards building a more inclusive society. As a result a new campaign has started, named “Better Together” with a main focus on educating secondary-school students on topics such as intergroup relations, stereotyping and discrimination, and encouraging them to help build a more inclusive society.
In the year 2020, a global pandemic, which deeply affected all aspects of everyday life, started. As a response, in April 2020, when a new SII team was selected, the Corona Care campaign was launched online. In the same year, after a few years of consideration, the team launched on the World Suicide Prevention Day (10th of September) the (A)live! campaign. This newest campaign will firstly run online, also due to the still present pandemic, but will eventually become something bigger and more similar to the Mind the Mind and Better Together campaigns.