At the beginning of October, Csilla Kálózi-Szabó and Zoltán Jakab, colleagues from the Institute of Special Needs Psychology, attended the European Union's Social Innovation Forum (2025) in Brussels.

The theme of the event was the strengthening of European societies and increasing their resilience through various forms of social innovation. The event was organised by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), which is the most important supporter of human and social rights within the EU. The theme of the forum, summarised in one question, was: how can we make our societies better places? The plenary presentations, workshops, and fifteen projects selected for presentation this year revolved around this topic. (Csilla Kálózi-Szabó and Zoltán Jakab, as members of a larger working group, applied for and were accepted to the forum with the results of their Tinlab project, conducted jointly with the Faculty of Information Technology.) The topics were extremely diverse, for example, the efforts of Irish government institutions to overcome bureaucracy and find constructive solutions to the problems of migration, homelessness, disability, and climate change; the transformation of the capital market and the preferential treatment of companies whose stated goal is to achieve positive social change; the challenges facing the labour market as a result of technological development and artificial intelligence; and the restructuring of the education system in response to these same changes.

The GYOPSZI-IK Tinlab working group contributed to this broad range of topics with an online testing system that examines children's intellectual development (executive functions). However, most of the participants were members of social organisations and NGOs, rather than representing the world of science. Nevertheless, all the participants were open and interested in the specific topics of the presentation.

The diversity of the forum is well illustrated by Zoltán Jakab's experiences:

"The following story perhaps illustrates the diversity of approaches. At the workshop, which focused on challenges in the labour market and education, the warm-up exercise for the small groups was to place themselves on a picture of an old multi-masted sailing ship in such a way that it expressed the basic attitude [that is] characteristic of their work. I placed myself in the crow's nest, explaining that I like to see and understand things from above. The Portuguese social worker sitting next to me, on the other hand, positioned himself in the fishing net hanging on the side of the ship, saying that he tries to fish out young people who have fallen out of the social net. Unsurprisingly, this fishing net mentality was much more common at this event than the crow's nest (ivory tower?) approach I represented. Overall, we found the event to be extremely useful; we hope that by participating, we have become a little more entangled in the social (fishing) net of social innovation.”