In February 2024, all the project partners gathered in Vaasa to finalize the strategic path for the project. Four intensive days of strategy making with the DEI4SME team in Vaasa were really exciting. Together DEI4SME project team:

- Explored how Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks shape needs and requirements of operations for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union (EU)

- Identified most relevant and pressing themes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in business within four core countries of the DEI4SME project (Finland, Lithuania, Austria, Germany), including the selection of diversity dimensions that we would like to address within the DEI4SME project.

- Discussed and understood who are the key stakeholders of our project and its deliverables.

- Aligned our individual, organizational, and project goals, so that we understand how the environments that we work in and our personal needs shape our views and abilities to reach our North Star, the ultimate aim to:

1. Develop a framework for planning, implementing, and monitoring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion related issues, applicable to the SME context.

2. Develop an open-access online tool for hashtag#planning, implementing, and monitoring social responsibility for SMEs to manage and hashtag#report social responsibility.

3. Develop a digital hashtag#educational infrastructure containing a course, a collection of cases and teaching guide on DEI management in SMEs to:
o teach social responsibility
o raise awareness among SMEs and HEIs about DEI and its effects on SMEs’ success
o help other institutions (HEI, CoC, VET, SMEs) to foster social responsibility and adopt the hashtag#open-access digital tool

- Worked on planning surveys and drafting ideas for the upcoming hackathons on solving DEI challenges in SME context

- and did a lot of fun activities, including walking on a frozen sea, to help us bond and become a stronger team, who can achieve the defined aims despite working in distance, facing various issues on the way, and needing lots of creativity to achieve synergies and innovate building on our team’s diversity.