Greek social support NGO providing field-level access to migrants, homeless populations, and excluded communities for EU research pilots.
PRAKSIS (full name: Programs of Development, Social Support and Medical Cooperation) is a Greek NGO that provides direct social and health services to marginalized and excluded populations — primarily migrants, refugees, and homeless individuals in Athens and Greece. In EU research projects, they serve as the community implementation partner: they contribute ground-level access to hard-to-reach groups that academic institutions and technology developers cannot easily recruit or engage on their own. Their core value in a consortium is the ability to run real-world pilots with actual service users from vulnerable communities, generating the kind of field data and user feedback that moves research from lab to practice. They operate at the intersection of social services, public health outreach, and digital inclusion for excluded groups.
Both WELCOME and CANCERLESS relied on PRAKSIS to engage hard-to-reach groups — migrants and homeless individuals — providing the community entry point that research consortia cannot self-generate.
WELCOME (2020-2023) used PRAKSIS as a field partner for deploying AI conversation agents and language teaching tools with newly arrived third-country nationals in a real service delivery context.
CANCERLESS (2021-2024) engaged PRAKSIS specifically for its experience reaching homeless individuals for cancer screening and early detection outreach in a European multi-site study.
WELCOME involved PRAKSIS in testing personalized embodied conversation agents, multilingual AI systems, and augmented reality tools within a real social support delivery environment.
PRAKSIS entered H2020 through the digital inclusion angle — their first project (WELCOME, 2020) placed them inside a technology-heavy consortium testing AI conversation agents, multilingual tools, and virtual/augmented reality for migrant integration. Their second project (CANCERLESS, 2021) moved sharply toward preventive health equity, centered on person-centred care and cancer screening among homeless populations with no digital technology component at all. This shift — from digital-for-inclusion to health-for-excluded — reflects a broadening of their community health mandate rather than a deepening of any single technology track. The consistent thread is their role as the bridge between research consortia and marginalized groups who would otherwise be invisible to EU science.
PRAKSIS is moving toward health equity and preventive care for excluded groups, making them a strong field-implementation candidate for future projects on health inequalities, social determinants of health, or community-based health interventions in Southern Europe.
PRAKSIS has never coordinated an H2020 project — they join as participants exclusively, which is consistent with their role as a field-implementation NGO rather than a research leader. Their two projects combined 26 unique partners, suggesting they are comfortable operating inside large, complex, multi-country consortia where they occupy a clearly scoped delivery role. Working with them means getting a reliable community-access partner who knows their lane and does not compete for scientific leadership.
Despite only two projects, PRAKSIS has connected with 26 unique consortium partners across 8 countries — an unusually wide network for an organization of this size and funding level, reflecting the large multi-partner consortia typical of social inclusion and health equity projects. Their network spans technology providers, academic health institutions, and other social NGOs across Europe.
PRAKSIS fills a gap that almost no other H2020 partner can fill: direct, operational access to homeless individuals and migrant/refugee populations in a Southern European context, backed by an established social services infrastructure in Greece. For any consortium needing to run pilots or collect data with excluded groups — rather than just theorize about them — PRAKSIS provides the community trust and organizational capacity that makes real-world validation possible. Their combination of social work roots, medical cooperation scope, and digital project experience is rare among Greek NGOs of comparable size.
