Social Enterprising Europe
Start date: Nov 1, 2012,
SEE (Social Enterprising Europe) aims at developing and testing a shared program and training materials in social entrepreneurship. This project addresses prospective and active social entrepreneurs, business trainers, and business coaches and incubators.The current situation raises specific social issues for Europe: raising unemployment, new poors, fragile families, new migrations, etc. On the other hand, this same situation call for empowering new forms of entrepreneurship. Social business, defined by Nobel Prize Prof. M. Yunus as “a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today”, has the potential to tackle both needs at the same time. Social business means understanding social issues not only as a matter for State intervention, but as opportunities to develop a sustainable economic activity. The start-up of a social business has two positive sides: generating new jobs, and tackling a social issue at hand.While the concept is being promoted globally in relation with micro-credit and developing countries, its effective impact in Europe is still to come for at least two reasons: (a) the lack of a common understanding of what social business would mean in European countries, and (b) the lack of a sound and consistent training program that would allow the integration of social business programs in business incubators and promotion activities.This project brings together grassroots social entrepreneurs, academic partners and business incubators to set up a program in social business to produce high quality digital training materials, including case studies, available in all partner languages, and to train trainers. The consortium spans from Mediterranean to Northern to Eastern Europe in order to develop a product properly localized for different business cultures.
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