Elie 2.0 is an innovative approach to supporting groups vulnerable to social exclusion into enterprise, sustainable, good quality employment or further VET training. A previous project, Eliemental, worked with groups vulnerable to social exclusion and identified socio-cultural barriers to enterprise. The team then created and rolled out a programme of soft skills development. This programme has had significant sucess with 55% of the 2018 UK cohort (older long-term unemployed, recent migrants, people with chronic health problems) moving on to start an enterprise, into employment or into further VET training. Similar programmes evaluated by Rolfe et al (2015) suggest a UK success rate for interventions with GVSE of 28% for young people under age 24, 22% for people age 25-65 and 10% for people with disabilities or chronic health conditions. Partners delivering Eliemental have been signposting participants onto a disparate range of enterprise support services and have reported that these are often not suitable for the participants who have come through from Eliemental. They have urged the development of a more innovative, experiential approach to enterprise learning to embed the hard skills needed for business start up among our participants who do not go on from Eliemental. We interviewed participants who did not move on from Eliemental training and found many were keen to carry on but were dismayed at the more rigid approach of the services they had to engage with in order to gain additional skills such as business planning, marketing, costing, regulation and funding. After these discussions we proposed a four part package to support the aims and aspirations of our target groups. Part One is the establishment of Community Enterprise Coaches who worked with small groups of participants in the heart of their local community. Local VET colleges find it difficult to recruit people from groups vulnerable to social exclusion, but embedding a link in the local community can overcome this barrier. Part Two is the development of digital learning materials that can be accessed from smart phones. The innovative element here is a mechanism to tailor the learning resources to the needs of the target community. Learning resources are available to download in recognition of digital literacy issues, lack of wifi or lack of 4G data. Access to VET is problematic for the socially excluded. Embedding VET in the heart of communities vulnerable to exclusion offers a new approach. Part Three is the creation of experiential learning opportunities through live projects for small groups of participants, supported by their community enterprise coach. These real-world projects linked to the learning objectives of the Elie 2.0 programme and gave participants experience of working with others outside their community, problem solving, reporting back to the live project owner and improved their networks Part Four is the development of student and SME owners as volunteer business consultants to provide advice to our participants in their local community. Business consultancy is expensive and provision is often in central business districts, not in the areas where socially excluded people live and work. Students studying business have a range of skills that can be shared with others if only a mechanism for doing so is provided. Using local community spaces identified by the project, and supported by the Community Enterprise Coach students and SME owners offered help with business planning, business model, market research, price research, basic book-keeping and national SME regulations. This part of the project has many benefits: students can gain valuable experience for their CV (and in many cases for extra-curricular activity awards offered by their university or college), SME owners can develop new partnerships with start-ups, Elie 2.0 participants gained an introduction to the services for small businesses offered by universities. This is important as too often there is a gulf between the expertise of universities and colleges and local small businesses. New networks were also established, an important feature of this part of the project as our work on the previous Eliemental project showed networks were critical to success for our participants, and the socially excluded are often excluded from networks. Elie 2.0 is an innovative, community based project that supports the European Commission (Enterprise & Industry) aim to improve access to enterprise and to VET for the socially excluded. As the EC has noted, ‘Certain groups in society, such as people from ethnic minorities, face additional difficulties in trying to set up businesses’ and highlights the need for innovative solutions to overcome barriers to entrepreneurship (http://ow.ly/8Obz8).
1. To work with deprived communities to map community enterprise & employment aspirations, needs & opportunities to develop an enterprise guide for communities 2. To trial the COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE GUIDE in 2 contrasting community settings per partner country 3. To use participatory approaches with 20 representatives of our target community to co-create ENTERPRISE LEARNING KIT 4. Pilot of COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE TOOLKIT with 25 participants per partner country, from communities vulnerable to social exclusion 5. To work with accreditation and awarding bodies to accredit our COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE KIT learning programme at EQF Level 2 6. To co-create with VET stakeholders a digital training resource (COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE COACHING KIT) 7. To pilot the Community Enterprise Coach training resource equipping 5 community enterprise & employability coaches per partner country 8. To work with awarding bodies to accredit our learning programme at EQF Level 3 9. To develop a mechanism for provision of live community-based business projects for groups of learners, led by community enterprise coaches (LIVE PROJECTS TOOLKIT) 10. Develop the NETWORK MAPPING KIT including a package of networking skills development activities for participants
Elie 2.0 follows on from two previous projects Elie (Employability: learning from immigrant entrepreneurs) which ran 2010-12, and Eliemental (Enterprise and Employability Learning for Groups Vulnerable to Social Exclusion) which ran 2012-2015. We had significant success with the outputs from the two earlier projects, particularly with supporting people from marginalised groups into enterprise, employment, or education. However, our participants often needed further learning to support them with starting or building up their business and found conventional approaches to enterprise learning difficult to access and unsuitable to their needs. Our trainees preferred our experiential and community-based learning approach to more traditional types of enterprise learning which tend to start with making a business plan and often assume learners have pre-existing networks, skills and knowledge to enable them to overcome social and cultural barriers to becoming entrepreneurial. Elie 2.0 was developed to address the need of groups vulnerable to social exclusion for an approach to enterprise learning that is accessible, easy to engage with and supported by opportunities for learning and practising new skills in their own community.