Our organization:

• Friendly Foundation holds all legal and artistic rights to the Friendly Concept and hosts our research. Here we initiate change- and learning processes in the form of artistic research and interventions. In dialogue with the public, but also as a methodology for our daily work in all Friendly projects and enterprises.
  This widens the horizon.
• Friendly Development works with renewal through social creativity. Here, we use self-empowerment processes as a potent tool for developing new idéas and projects – in close collaboration with stakeholders deeply affected by the current structural change, mostly long-term unemployed.
• Friendly Sverige functions as a flexible incubator, where we transform Friendly projects to Friendly enterprises in a get-real situation. This is also our centre for economy, administration and marketing.
• Kamrer Direkt (Instant Bookkeeper) is the first incorporated company that has made the transition from Friendly project to enterprise. This social business concept matches redundant administrative staff (which are losing employment in increasing numbers) with needs in the small-scale business community and in the third sector. 
• Isolen is developing innovative insulation products, manufactured from sheep's wool. This project is also exploring the market for eco- friendly building materials. The project is currently taken over by another organization in a process of transition into a self-sustained social business.

The Friendly Development Group is an ongoing prototyping, aiming at creating new jobs for long-term unemployed in southern Sweden. This is done by means of collaborative prospecting of new businesses in the field of social enterprising. For the purpose,  we run three separate Development Labs. FDG provides services to the Swedish Public Employment Service and has started several local and regional development projects.

Report on the creation of FDG: Självsådd: Årsberättelse (in Swedish)

Friendly in its entirety is a versatile agency for structural change. The core idea is to stage development processes with a potential to challenge political and economical beliefs taken for granted in society, but also to propose constructive alternatives. This is done in different creative, playful and innovative ways.

Friendly represents a get-real, hands-on practice, equally useful within and outside predominant structural frameworks. The Friendly concept for change is including and humane. Its uniqueness stems from a methodology utilizing artistic tools for the purpose of moulding testbed spaces, where unexpected possibilities can be perceived and new methods prototyped.

In a longer perspective, the Friendly plan is to research and explore a wide range of strategies for resilient change, including Friendly Crowd Sourcing, Resource Pooling etc. The implementation will be process- oriented, collaborative and experimental forms of societal development and innovation.

More Friendly reading:
the Friendly Foundation

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