The introductory conference, which took place on April 26, 2024 in Rijeka, marked the beginning of the implementation of the "CENTINOSS - CENTER for innovations in social care" project, which is jointly implemented by the  Home for Elderly Kantrida Rijeka, the University of Reka Foundation, the Nina Pokorn Grmovje Home for Elderly and the University Alma Mater Europea under the leadership of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County as the leading partner of the project.

"We will work in the direction that the future synergy between us, the project partners, will stimulate the development of new knowledge and social innovations and thus contribute to raising the quality of social welfare services for care in the community, in Croatia and Slovenia," said the researcher and PhD student at Alma Mater Suzanna Mežnarec in her address.

The main goals include strengthening partnerships between organizations, improving access to services, establishing a "Center for Social Innovation" to transfer good practices and education, and developing new care models. The project's ultimate goal is to create a proposal for a national strategy and an action plan for the development of social innovations, based on which a better model of inclusion would be developed for all social service providers.

"We accept the CENTINOSS project as one of the results of concern for the future of an aging society, in which the European Commission tends to create policies based on the promotion of research, development, innovation, and knowledge transfer. European projects and our INTERREG project CENTINOSS are designed in this direction.

In Europe, the rapid growth of the elderly population, especially those over 80 years of age, has emphasized the deinstitutionalization of long-term care, which means the transformation of existing services and the development of new services integrated into community care.

The knowledge that the teaching team in this field transfers to the students and exchanges them at the international level is an excellent basis on which the researchers of Alma Mater University will contribute to the CENTINOSS project by setting criteria by which social innovations can be evaluated. This will be the basis for strategies and action plans of this new project," said Suzanna Mežnarec.