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Social Enterprise Development, Education and Training Tools
Start date: Oct 3, 2016, End date: Oct 2, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

This strategic partnership aims to support the development of innovative practices in the education and training of individuals engaged in social enterprise (S.E.) The outputs of the project will impact on the capacity of the social enterprise sector at organizational, local, regional, national and European levels. The project partnership (8 Nr organisations) is led by Glyndwr University, Wales and is both cross sectoral and pan European in its complexion as it includes a further / vocational education college (Ireland), four independent training / youth advisory agency (Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Italy) and two community interest company/ S.E. training agencies (Wales and Spain). Many successful S.E. in the more developed western and southern European countries have grown by developing their organizational capacity. This has allowed such organisations to achieve the needed investment funding to deliver their aspirations and mission statements. The former focus of social enterprises on looking for grant aid to support an exciting new idea needs to change; social entrepreneurs, S.E. managers and their potential investors must recognize that excellence in innovation is insufficient on its own to generate lasting business results. The co-production of local solutions to social problems needs S.E. organizations to be innovative and have the capacity to attract investors by being able to demonstrate their impact and develop the organisational profile, leadership and management approach to deliver the services and goods required in the locality. In the northern, central and eastern parts of Europe the concept of S.E. is not yet fully appreciated or understood and its potential as a vehicle to tackle youth unemployment, and consequent social and economic exclusion in disadvantaged locations is subsequently not as widely recognised. As a result there is a need to build capacity in this sector on a cross European basis so as to enable existing social S.E. and new potential social entrepreneurs to develop, grow and become sustainable.Therefore this project aims to develop a digitally enhanced blended learning set of S.E. development, education and training tools (SEDETT) that can be used by, social entrepreneurs to learn how to assess their capacity development needs (IO1), educators and trainers in HE/FE and VET to deliver formal and informal courses of education and training (IO2) . The materials produced will be open access and also include an e-tool that can be used by social entrepreneurs to identify creative education methodologies for use in their organisational development (IO3). These results will be based on case study research undertaken with 24 Nr S.E. organisations in urban and rural environments located in differing European national contexts. The synthesis of the data from the basic research will allow blended e-learning tools to be developed that are open access Thus the target groups for this project are students/learners, teachers, partners institutions, other educational institutions, research centres, employers and their associations, unemployed youth, education, careers and youth advisory agencies and policy-makers, existing social enterprises & their employees seeking to up-skill and achieve life long learning.The short term impact of the project will be a toolkit of blended e-learning SEDETT that can be used for formal and in-formal courses of HE/FE/VET and which in the longer term will help develop capacity in the S.E sector across Europe. The work will contribute to the emergent EMES research agenda on innovation in social enterprise. The work also supports the key priorities set out in the Europe 2020 agenda and the Modernising Agenda for Higher Education that were identified in the E.U. Education and Training Strategy 2020 in terms of the way the work will contribute to (i) the improvement of the quality and relevance of teaching and learning related to social enterprise through the development of case study research and evidence based curricula related to mission, structure, governance, leadership and management practices and value impact measurement tools in use (IO1); (ii) the strengthening of lifelong learning and mobility of existing employees in social enterprise organisations through the development of the digital SEDETT toolkit (IO2), (ii) the promotion of mobility staff and students on a cross border basis that will result from participating in this project; strengthen the knowledge triangle that links education, research and innovation related to the promotion of the social enterprise. Overall the development of the blended web enabled digitally enhanced SEDETT toolkit will contribute to the challenge of opening up education through the development and use of technology to facilitate personalized learning at differing levels of engagement by differing types of cross sector education and training providers.
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