ESEE project aimed at achieving the following objectives: 1. Raise awareness about social entrepreneurship as a viable and impactful approach to addressing social and environmental challenges. 2. Develop and enhance the skills, knowledge, and capabilities of NGOs’ and charitable organisations’ staff interested in social entrepreneurship. 3. Advocate for supportive policies and regulatory frameworks that enable the growth and sustainability of social enterprises. 4. Facilitate networking opportunities and collaboration among NGOs, charitable organisations, institutions and individuals interested in social entrepreneurship. 5. Search for good practices at European level regarding mechanisms that provide financial support to social entrepreneurs, such as grants, seed funding, impact investment and affordable loans. 6. Conduct desktop research on the local (Cypriot) context and the European level, social challenges, and best practices in social entrepreneurship. 7. Engage the broader community and promote the importance of social responsibility. These objectives aimed to address the multifaceted challenges of setting up a social enterprise in Cyprus due to the lack of appropriate ecosystem (eg. lack of public funding schemes).
ESEE project focused on how small NGOs and charitable organisations can be transformed under the new reality of social economy in Cyprus. For many of these organisations the current situation is existential, while the consequences of the third Covid-19 wave created even more insecurities for NGOs, which they require additional support to find alternative and complementary means of supporting themselves and start acting as social enterprises and transformed according to the current conditions of our era. ESEE project identified this need and aimed at offering skill-building opportunities that are extremely valuable in developing an entrepreneurial movement within the sector of NGOs. ESEE suggested that by strengthening general project development and management skills of social scientists, local or wider communities will benefit from an entrepreneurial movement. This is particularly relevant to NGOs’ staff who can act as social entrepreneurs and can develop new social programs at local/national level. ESEE was tailored to promote entrepreneurship, creative learning and social entrepreneurship by instigating opportunities for the participating socially engaged staff, produce new innovative ideas and consider how to implement them.