Back to search

LAUNCHING A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE (LASE)

2022-1-PT02-KA153-YOU-0000543982022Mobility of youth workersfinalizedGood practice
Countries: PT|CY|LT|EL|BG|ES|LV|HU|MK · Grant: €43,061
Entrepreneurial learning - entrepreneurship educationQuality and innovation of youth workInclusion of marginalised young people

Objectives

This project was designed to empower and inspire young people to start their social enterprises. This is quite important because small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) comprise around 50% of the economy of a country, creating new jobs, therefore, reducing unemployment. Besides, new social enterprises introduce new products and social services, increasing the quality of life of marginalized people or tackling environmental problems. New ideas promoted by new social ventures raise awareness of societal problems, creating or supporting its discourse in a society. Nevertheless, the pace of development of SMEs around European Union countries goes down. This is caused by issues such as low initial capitalization of new ventures, the liability of newness, dependency on external resource owners, but also the lack of knowledge, skills, and mentorship of founders and staff. The latter is an issue that was tackled within this PDA. Because young people face the problem of finding legitimacy for their enterprises, they cannot start their enterprises efficiently. Therefore, they require special attention and support, which gives greater access to business training, knowledge, and practical skills. Our training course pursued this goal as well. We looked at the stereotypes that surrounded entrepreneurship regarding the particular born traits that were sometimes believed to be crucial for venture creation and understood how all these stereotypes that we grew up with affected us emotionally. Such stereotypes prevent young people from dreaming and acting big, therefore, this was the first and foremost issue to tackle. We broke the stereotypes and empowered participants to believe in themselves and understand their impact on the outer world. While exploring the stereotypes, we examined particular barriers that marginalized people faced while embracing starting their businesses. This helped us understand the socially constructed nature of inequality that surrounded the business creation process and worked towards finding ways to tackle this inequality and be respected and trustworthy as new venture founders or a team of founders. We learned how to find the burning issues that needed tackling in a local community by studying the process of research and idea initiation and simulating real-world situations for brainstorming in a team, studying the needs and pains of a community. This equipped the participants with the practical skills of pre-organizational activity. Besides, we got inspired by the examples of social entrepreneurs with humble backgrounds or those who could be related to marginalized groups of people. This helped the participants raise confidence and "wear" the potential role of entrepreneurs and understand the entrepreneurial path on a personal level of a creator. The training course was held in a safe environment where young people could explore and share their fears, goals, and entrepreneurial intentions. We practiced active listening and communication to be free in expressing different opinions and critically evaluating them, being aware of prejudices and preconceptions, and recognizing forms of manipulation. Participants were equipped with business modeling techniques and knowledge of strategy building for a mindful, careful, and professional approach towards business initiation, working on all stages of research and action such as segmentation of the target audience, building a value proposition, developing customer relationships and channels, key activities, resources, and partnerships, costs, and revenue streams. We empowered young people with the skills and confidence to involve resources in their ideas, attracting financial support, staff, and customers through pitching experience. All the above were issues and needs that came to an agreement with the needs of all organizations (applicant and partners), and we tried, according to our project, to provide all the above-mentioned issues and to empower young people to start their social enterprises to tackle local problems and bring a change.

Project partners (9)