With GSEF2021 postponed to 4^th ~ 8^th October 2021 due to COVID-19, GSEF has promptly switched all its activities online to pave the way towards GSEF2021. The first notable effort was the online webinar series co-organized in collaboration with the GSEF2021 Mexico Local Organizing Committee (LOC: Institute of Social Economy of Mexico INAES, and the Mexico City Government) from May through September 2020.  
GSEF organized four cycles of webinar series in our three official languages (English, French, and Spanish) and invited our members, partners, and experts in various fields to highlight the contribution from Social and Solidarity Economy actors in times of difficulties and challenges.  It reached out to more than 5,700 people from more than 50 countries throughout its twelve sessions. For more details and recordings/materials of each session, please visit the designated section on the GSEF website.

The second effort is the launch of ‘The GSEF Global Virtual Forum’ with the main theme of “Great Challenges, Greater Solidarity: SSE as path for transformation”. This event has attracted more than 15,000 registrations and outreached 163,000 people through direct participation, website, and social media from over 100 countries. We were honored to invite more than 200 speakers from international organizations (UN agencies, ILO, EU, ICA, UCLG, etc.), national governments, local governments, SSE intermediaries and SSE frontiers to share their insights on how SSE respond to the current social and economic challenges. The GSEF Global Virtual Forum covered various topics including youth, women, indigenous people, social finance, and collaboration between government and SSE stakeholders, etc.  You can find the details and essential materials of a week- long global discussions, debates, and knowledge sharing on the GSEF2021 official website. There, you can also find all the suggestions and comments from the speakers and participants from all 35 sessions, together with session summaries and videos.
  
As a result of fruitful discussion and feedback from the forum, the initial themes for GSEF2021 are now identified. We should be able to get more comments from members, partners, and experts and share them with you in our next newsletter.  Throughout 2021, more activities will be gearing up for GSEF2021. GSEF will join all the efforts with the members and partners to foster the ecosystem for the Social and Solidarity Economy advocating for sustainability, solidarity, equality, and inclusion for all, through all the possible ways to connect us.