More than 70 people attended the activities of the IX Annual GEACCOUNTING Congress which, under the title “Measuring what matters, Social Value as a lever for change“, was held on November 25 and 26, 2021. This scientific meeting was organized by the Cajasiete Chair of Social and Cooperative Economy of the academic institution and the Grupo Innovaris consultancy, and was sponsored by the Government of the Canary Islands and the City Council of La Laguna.

This has been the ninth edition of the congress organized each year by Global Economical Accounting (GEAccounting www.geaccounting.org), a non-profit economic interest group that aims to create a community of people interested in social accounting, and annually organizes this meeting to share advances in research in this area.

On Thursday 25, several round tables were held at the headquarters of the Presidency of the Government in Santa Cruz de Tenerife that served for academics and professionals to reflect and debate on the challenges of the present and the future of the social value calculation model, and so that the students could know the process in its entirety.

Also, the president of Cajasiete, Fernando Bergé, highlighted the role of the social economy in promoting sustainable progress and the actions that the entity has been carrying out for a long time, while the president of GEACCOUNTING, José Ignacio Laretxi, spoke about the importance of social value as a process to measure the contribution of entities to society, and specially for Agro aliment Cooperatives.

After the opening table, Professor Leire San José reviewed the challenges of normalization and internationalization of social accounting and answered questions from the audience. She also explained the importance of AgriCoopValue Project to widespread the Social Accounting in Agro aliment Cooperatives in Europe.

To end the day, a series of recognitions were given by GEACCOUNTING to Leire San José for her MOOC course in Social Accounting, Beatriz Guzman for her work in expanding this accounting method in the Canary Islands, and the organization of the event, collected by Professor Javier Mendoza. For its part, the Cajasiete Chair of Social and Cooperative Economy awarded recognitions to the entities Sociedad Agraria de Transformación FAST La Orotava, Hotel Tigaiga, Cajasiete, Mercado Nuestra Señora de África de Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Fishermen’s Brotherhood Nuestra Señora del Socorro de Tenerife , for having implemented social accounting.

On Friday 26, the congress consisted of four workshops that allowed participants to learn about different aspects of the monetization of social value: introduction to the monetization of social value, given by Beatriz Guzmán and Javier Mendoza (University of La Laguna); definition of variables, proxies and indicators, by Alexis Robles and Sergio Suárez (Grupo Innovaris); facilitating tools to involve stakeholders, by Silvia Ayuso, from the Mango Chair of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Escola Superior de Comerç Internacional- Pompeu Fabra University; and unification of terminology of social accounting, by Ramón Bernal (University of the Basque Country) and Alfonso Etxanobe (LKS Next).