Spanish disability foundation offering co-design expertise and structured access to disability communities for EU research consortia.
Fundación ONCE is the social foundation of ONCE (Spain's National Organization of the Blind), dedicated to the social and labor inclusion of people with disabilities across Spain. In EU research projects, they serve as a civil society partner who brings direct access to disability communities, lived experience, and advocacy expertise that most research consortia cannot source elsewhere. They contribute to projects by conducting user research with persons with disabilities, facilitating co-design sessions with vulnerable populations, and evaluating accessibility outcomes against real-world needs. Their value is not as a technical research body but as the bridge between research teams and the communities most affected by the technologies being developed.
SoCaTel placed FONCE in a co-creation role developing a long-term care platform with older adults and social workers; SAFERUP engaged them to evaluate urban pavement accessibility from a disability user perspective.
SoCaTel (2017-2021) directly targeted long-term care access for aging populations, an area central to ONCE's social mission.
SAFERUP used FONCE's accessibility expertise to assess urban pavements for disabled users; SoCaTel required digital accessibility input for the care platform.
Both projects relied on FONCE's ability to recruit, engage, and gather structured input from disability communities and care professionals.
SoCaTel keywords include integrated care, big data in social care, and public service professionals, indicating policy-adjacent advisory work.
FONCE's first documented H2020 engagement (SoCaTel, 2017) focused on the digital and organizational layer of social care — co-creating platforms for older adults, integrating big data into long-term care, and bridging social workers with digital tools. Their second project (SAFERUP, 2018) shifted attention to the physical environment, contributing accessibility expertise to a pavement engineering consortium, which is a markedly different technical domain. While both engagements are clearly united by the theme of disability inclusion and accessibility, the shift from social care software to urban infrastructure suggests FONCE is being recognized as a generalist accessibility authority rather than a specialist in any single domain.
FONCE appears to be extending its role as a cross-domain accessibility partner — applied to social care platforms in one project and urban engineering in another — making them a versatile civil society partner for any consortium that needs grounded disability-inclusion expertise and community access.
FONCE has never led an H2020 project as coordinator, always joining as a participant or third-party contributor — a pattern consistent with a civil society organization whose value is domain expertise and community access rather than project management capacity. Their footprint in both projects appears deliberately modest in funding terms (EUR 26,841 total), suggesting they are engaged for targeted contributions rather than large work packages. With 43 unique partners across 17 countries, they clearly attract interest from diverse consortia, which points to their scarcity value: few organizations offer direct, institutionalized access to Spain's disability community.
FONCE has built a surprisingly broad network for an organization with only two projects — 43 unique consortium partners across 17 countries, which is large relative to their project count and suggests they joined multi-partner consortia. Their network spans both social science and engineering domains, reflecting the cross-disciplinary nature of accessibility research.
FONCE is one of very few large, institutionalized disability foundations in Spain with formal EU research experience, which makes them rare in the H2020 ecosystem where civil society partners are often small and underfunded. They offer something most research partners cannot replicate: structured, representative access to the disability community — people with visual, motor, and cognitive impairments — for user testing, co-design workshops, and accessibility validation. For any project that needs to demonstrate real-world inclusion rather than just claiming it, FONCE is a credible and visible partner that strengthens the societal impact section of a proposal.
