About the We make transition! project
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 About the We make transition! project

Local and regional authorities have a crucial role in driving resilience – societal ability to adapt and react. Due to the complexity of sustainability challenges, there is a need to mobilise all levels of society to create and implement solutions that enable systemic changes in our unsustainable practices. Civil society actors – associations, social entrepreneurs, cooperatives, communities, individuals – can have a pioneering role in enhancing ecological and social sustainability.

We make transition! project engages a great number of regional and local authorities, civil society, and other innovation actors from the Baltic Sea region. Partners from six countries cooperate with altogether 12 cities and municipalities in implementing local transition arena workshop processes including co-creation of a joint vision, pathways, concrete solutions, and initiatives that enhance the cooperation with civil society actors. The topics of the processes focus on either 1) sustainable lifestyle, 2) agriculture & food, 3) biodiversity, or 4) circular & sharing economy. The main output of the project will be a practical manual for applying the transition management approach to make strategy processes such as climate plans, roadmaps, and local strategies more interactive to involve also civil society actors.

On this platform we invite you to read and comment our publications including:

  • Case studies on civil society making sustainability transitions

  • Baltic Sea region sustainability vision and recommendations co-created by a transnational group of change agents

  • How to improve cooperation between local authorities and civil society actors? – a transnational gap analysis.

  • Manual for applying the transition arena method for inclusive governance (available later).

Publication: More about the project

BSR vision of sustainable life
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BSR vision of sustainable life

We How does sustainable future 2035 look like from the point of view of various civil society actors? We make transition! project invited a group of change agents from BSR countries to co-create an inspiring sustainability vision and recommendations on empowering the cooperation between local authorities and civil society actors to enhance ecological and social sustainability.

Publication: BSR vision of sustainable life

New educational modules for social entrepreneurs are available
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New educational modules for social entrepreneurs are available

The social economy is a business model that works for the future of Europe. Within the RevitaLESE project, we have developed several educational models to strengthen European social enterprises, offer inspiration to the next generation of social entrepreneurs and educate about the necessary steps needed to ensure a more sustainable society. 

Closing the RevitaLese project (https://revitalese.eu/), we would like to share developed training modules for the promotion of social entrepreneurship, which are available in several EU languages and video instructions for their use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OPkolu_KR54

A short two-year summary of the project is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hHc6MNTJwA
Share, use, and learn!

Mentorship program for Ukrainians in Vilnius
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Mentorship program for Ukrainians in Vilnius

Let’s admit it – the best way to get to know a new city is with the help of a local. After all, if you’re staying for a longer period of time, you not only need to find a place to live – you also need to find a job, a kindergarten or school for your children, and a doctor as well. So the help of a local becomes invaluable. If you’re a Ukrainian who has come to the capital, you can meet your local friend in the BeFriend Vilnius mentoring programme – all you have to do is register and wait to be introduced to a volunteer. Your mentor will answer all your questions and help you with any problems that might come up.

 

For more information please visit the site directly HERE. 

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

The complete guide to growing and scaling your social enterprise
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The complete guide to growing and scaling your social enterprise

We’ve learned a few things in helping support over 900 social enterprises around the world scale their operations with the help of our Experteers, Capacity Building Programs, research, and educational programming. Our work has touched early stage, award-winning enterprises long before they reached international acclaim, including groups like Inyenyeri, Sistema B, M-KOPA, Ubongo and BEMPU. At all stages in the social enterprise “pioneer gap”, we’ve been in the trenches with small, growing, and even large social enterprises. Along the way, we’ve scaled up our own award-winning social enterprise, too.

We’ve seen first hand what research continues to prove: Most social impact startups fall wildly short of their projections and end up going out business. The main reason? Social entrepreneurship is hard. Really hard. But there is another reason, too: founders, biased by their own egos and intuition, don’t take the time to truly embrace proven frameworks that will increase the odds of success.

Despite what you might think, there are no such things as visionary entrepreneurs. In fact, the number one reason that startups fail is because founders think they have an idea that will work, when in reality there is no market for it. This is why startup guidance is full of quotes like “fall in love with problems, not your solution”, “don’t become a technology in search of a problem” and “get out of the building”.

So how do you stack the odds in your favor when growing a social enterprise? Our guide below shares the most impactful frameworks and tools that you need to grow and scale your social enterprise. It’s still going to be a long, hard journey, but we’ve found that it helps to know that you’re not alone (even when it feels like you’re riding a lion).

Full guide is available HERE.

 

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
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Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

Social enterprises combine societal goals with an entrepreneurial spirit. These organisations focus on achieving wider social, environmental or community objectives. The European Commission aims to create a favourable financial, administrative and legal environment for these enterprises so that they can operate on an equal footing with other types of enterprises in the same sector. The Social Business Initiative, launched in 2011 identified actions to make a real difference and improve the situation on the ground for social enterprises.

What are social enterprises?

A social enterprise is an operator in the social economy whose main objective is to have a social impact rather than make a profit for their owners or shareholders. It operates by providing goods and services for the market in an entrepreneurial and innovative fashion and uses its profits primarily to achieve social objectives. It is managed in an open and responsible manner and, in particular, involves employees, consumers and stakeholders affected by its commercial activities.

The Commission uses the term ‘social enterprise’ to cover the following types of business

  • Those for who the social or societal objective of the common good is the reason for the commercial activity, often in the form of a high level of social innovation
  • Those whose profits are mainly reinvested to achieve this social objective
  • Those where the method of organisation or the ownership system reflects the enterprise’s mission, using democratic or participatory principles or focusing on social justice

There is no single legal form for social enterprises. Many social enterprises operate in the form of social cooperativesSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••, some are registered as private companies limited by guarantee, some are mutual, and a lot of them are non-profit-distributing organisations like provident societies, associations, voluntary organisations, charities or foundations.

Despite their diversity, social enterprises mainly operate in the following 4 fields

  • Work integration – training and integration of people with disabilities and unemployed people
  • Personal social services – health, well-being and medical care, professional training, education, health services, childcare services, services for elderly people, or aid for disadvantaged people
  • Local development of disadvantaged areas – social enterprises in remote rural areas, neighbourhood development/rehabilitation schemes in urban areas, development aid and development cooperation with third countries
  • Other – including recycling, environmental protection, sports, arts, culture or historical preservation, science, research and innovation, consumer protection and amateur sports.

The social business initiative

The social business initiative (SBI), launched in 2011, aims to introduce a short-term action plan to support the development of social enterprises, key stakeholders in the social economy and social innovation. It also aims to prompt a debate on the avenues to be explored in the medium/long term. There are 11 priority measures, organised around 3 themes:

Initiated by the SBI, the Commission and the expert group on social entrepreneurship, established a 5 pillar strategy aimed at increased access to funding, access to markets, improved framework conditions, foster social innovation and continue to work on internationalisation. See more on the implementation of the 5 pillar strategy.

More information is available HERE.

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

EaSI Technical Assistance for social enterprise finance
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EaSI Technical Assistance for social enterprise finance

Social enterprises contribute to the European policy in the area of employment and social inclusion and are particularly relevant for the implementation of the rights and principles expressed in the European Pillar for Social Rights.

The European Commission recognised the potential of social enterprises for innovation and their positive impact on the economy and society at large in its Social Business Initiative and Start-up and Scale-up Initiative. Within this context, lack of or poor access to finance was identified as one of the most significant barriers to the creation and development of social enterprises.

To this end, several financial instruments have been launched within the EaSI programme and the European Fund for Strategic Investments. In addition, EaSI technical assistance – which previously addressed only microcredit providers – has been extended to cover also targeted support to social enterprise finance intermediaries.

A consortium of service providers performs these technical assistance support services, on behalf of the European Commission. The lead partner of the consortium is the European Center for Social Finance at the Munich Business School. Services will be provided in collaboration with a network of around 25 established experts from the field.

Therefore, if you are funding or planning to fund social enterprises, you might be eligible for valuable technical assistance services.

What is in it for you?

Social enterprise finance intermediaries wishing to improve relevant aspects of their operations, performance and governance can apply for technical assistance with a view to boosting their institutional capacity. The aim is to select organisations that are in most need of support from EaSI Technical Assistance, ensuring a balanced geographical representation.

The social enterprise finance intermediaries targeted by the technical assistance services comprise:

  • social enterprise finance providers (such as banks, public and private investment funds, fund-of-funds or (co-) investment schemes)
  • impact investors keen to address in the future the market segment of the EaSI Guarantee for social enterprises (i.e. investments of up to €500,000)
  • social enterprise support organisations (such as incubators, accelerators) that offer accompanying financial support
  • social enterprise support organisations (such as incubators, accelerators) that are in the process of widening their scope with a view to providing accompanying financial support to social enterprises.

These technical assistance services focus on capacity building and cover analysis, training in designing suitable financial instruments, applying suitable tools and ensuring quality, mutual learning and exchange of good practice, networking and partnering, monitoring and evaluation.

What services are on offer?

More detailed information is available HERE.

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

Official Launch of the 2020 World Youth Report: Youth Social Entrepreneurship and the 2030 Agenda
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Official Launch of the 2020 World Youth Report: Youth Social Entrepreneurship and the 2030 Agenda

2 Jul 2020 – Briefing by Mr. Elliot Harris, UN Chief Economist and Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development as well as a youth social entrepreneur, on the 2020 World Youth Report: Youth Social Entrepreneurship and the 2030 Agenda.

The 2020 edition of the World Youth Report focuses on youth social entrepreneurship with a view to provide partners, including Member States, with policy guidance on how to build ecosystems that enables and supports youth social entrepreneurship. Such an ecosystem comprises entrepreneurial actors and networks as well as economic, educational, financial, institutional and technical conditions conducive to entrepreneurial activity. The success of youth social entrepreneurship rests on an accurate assessment of its merits, opportunities and challenges and on the development and implementation of a cohesive and enabling ecosystem.

Detailed explanation on video is available HERE.

 

 

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

YBI launches Green & Social Entrepreneurship Month
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YBI launches Green & Social Entrepreneurship Month

Throughout our global network, we are seeing more and more young entrepreneurs build businesses that deliver profit with purpose. They are the entrepreneurs working to solve some of the greatest environmental and social challenges of our time and will play a vital role in creating a more equitable and sustainable world for us all.
It is our ambition to provide these young green and social entrepreneurs with the support they need to grow and sustain their businesses and we are on a journey with our global network to develop the most effective approaches, methodologies and tools to achieve this goal. As part of this work, we are excited to launch our first ever Green & Social Entrepreneurship Month, dedicated to supporting and celebrating young green and social entrepreneurs around the world. Find out what we have planned below:

Developing tailored support for young green and social entrepreneurs
Young green and social entrepreneurs have specific needs that entrepreneurship support organisations need to cover in their support offerings. These range from reconciling passion and purpose with profit to deciding on a legal form for the business, defining a theory of change and measuring impact, to name a few.

This month, we are launching several publications and initiatives to help our members meet these specific needs in their support for young green and social entrepreneurs. This includes our Social and Green Entrepreneurship Toolkit – a collection of useful resources and tools for entrepreneurship support organisations, exclusively available to our members.

To leverage our global network’s expertise and experience in supporting young green and social entrepreneurs, we are hosting a series of regional member workshops on green and social entrepreneurship in the first week of April. Each workshop will bring together our members from the respective region to share how they are currently supporting young green and social entrepreneurs, identify challenges and existing solutions, and brainstorm ideas to address remaining challenges. Building on these discussions, we will launch a Community of Practice on Green and Social Entrepreneurship to continuously learn from each other about this important topic.

In addition to the above, we are looking forward to launching our positioning paper ‘ Shaping A More Inclusive, Equitable and Sustainable Future: Supporting young social and green entrepreneurs’ at the end of April. The paper shares our definition of a green or social enterprise, explores the specific support young green and social entrepreneurs need to succeed and defines our role in driving social and green youth entrepreneurship – watch this space for the launch coming soon.
More information is available HERE.

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This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.

Optimy: ALL-IN-ONE SOCIAL IMPACT PLATFORM
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Optimy: ALL-IN-ONE SOCIAL IMPACT PLATFORM

Empower your impact

A simple, flexible and customizable social impact platform. Designed to help you save time, be more efficient and drastically improve your social impact projects.

Thanks to more than 10 years of research and developments based on the needs of our users, we have developed the CSR platform Optimy to improve your social impact projects’ efficiency and performance. Our purpose is to equip you with the most flexible and intuitive online software, with features that match your needs and a dedicated support to reach your goals.

THE ALL-IN-ONE PLATFORM

How Optimy works

It starts with collecting valuable and relevant data to selecting projects and applicants to match your values and CSR goals. Then you need to manage all these activities, the participants, budgets, and administrative tasks. But how would you know how effective your missions were if you don’t report on them? Optimy helps you to do it all.

COLLECT

Gather data through an easy application process

SELECT

Review and select the best social impact projects quickly

MANAGE

Get an overview of your projects’ status and collaborate efficiently

REPORT

Create meaningful reports about your CSR and social impact activities

Find out more: here