Social Enterprise World Forum
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the SEWF last week in Amsterdam, now that I’ve had some time to reflect on all I learnt (along with recovering from Covid!) I thought I’d share some insights.
Doing a PhD is an incredibly hard and lonely slog and so to have the opportunity to be surrounded by inspiring social entrepreneurs was an absoloute delight and I’m so grateful for the opportunity.
I kicked off my week at the SEWF fringe event ‘ Research and Education Conference’ at the Business Campus of Amsterdam University. Keynote speaker Dr. Mike Bull from Manchester Met. University provided some context with how business views on social responsibility have evolved through several iterations from the 1970’s when Friedmans view was that shareholder wealth is everything, Carrolls introduced the Pyramid of CSR in 1991, right up to Ridley-Duff & Southcombes discussion of the Social Enterprise Mark. Thankfully things have (somewhat) changed from Friedmans views! Dr. Bull left me with the thought-provoking question ‘ Are social enterprises picking up the problems of the corporate sector or redesigning the approach?’ I can’t help but think it is the former, and perhaps that is why it can be such a challenge, perhaps we need a different approach.
There were lots of interesting sessions, but just two I will highlight (or else this will be an amazingly long blogpost!)
I attended a really interesting workshop on Systems Mapping for social entrepreneurs with Hannah Hartwich, a practical workshop on how to conduct a systems mapping with plenty of interesting debate, most notably around how do systems mapping and theory of change best interface. Definitely a question for Innovate Communities!
The second one I’ll mention was another practical workshop on Scaling Social impact through collaboration. Investigating how to create better collaboration between Work integrated Social Enterprises and for-profit organisations. Using a 3 stage tool that could help both organisations move through orientation phase (testing the waters), an integration phase (Integrating operations) and finally moving on to transformational change. Unfortunately the model was in Dutch, so I can’t share, but you can read more about the concept here - and I’m assured it will be available soon. It felt like a very practical tool that could be used to navigate challenging conversations and ensure long-term strategic partnerships continue. One of the participants at my table advised that only 15% of these kinds of strategic partnerships in the U.S. last beyond 5 years. Given the enormous amount of work it takes to get them off the ground it seems worthwhile investing the time to set them up well.
On to the main event which kicked off with a showcase of some brilliant local social entrepreneurs, including Roetz-Bike who are bringing 10-12 people back to work annually, and also tackling the short life span of E-Bikes (3-7 years). They are building modular ebikes that are repairable in minutes, ensuring they are upgradeable, future-proofed and cost-effective to repair.
During the session on the role of social enterprise in corporate partnership, Mark Horoszowski of Moving Worlds shared that whilst there is never enough capital going through social enterprises in the valley between start-up and scale-up the corporate market represents a 13 trillion market opportunity. It was interesting to see that the issues facing social enterprises in Ireland are not unique and are experienced the world over. Looking at power imbalances has been one of the themes of my PhD and came up in the room, however, we were assured that actually social enterprises hold more power than they think, they are creating solutions for challenges and blockages that exist in corporate entities and so should step in and embrace their power and approach partnerships on an equal-footed manner.
Tony Chocoloneys is a well-known and well-loved social enterprise and it was a delight to hear Paul Schoenmakers their Head of Impact speak about their story at the session on: Internationalisation: Engaging international markets to acheive greater social and environmental impact. Paul shared how they have always focused on being an impact organisation and kept this at the centre when making decisions. One of the pieces work they have done is to figure out what level of living wage was required to get farmers out of poverty. One of the tips of the session for scaling up was ensuring values are internalised to ensure scaling doesn’t result in the diluting of values.
After an evening of Karaoke with new friends, I was ready for day 2!
The morning kicked off with the launch of a new global social enterprise verification called ‘People & Planet First’ from the Social Enterprise World Forum itself. This has been adopted by 77 countries across the globe, including Ireland (through SERI). I attended a session later on, which delved into the verification in more detail. Social enterprises will be evaluated under a points system and must hit a minimum criteria in each category of: Purpose, Operations, Financial returns, Reinvesting Majority, Having a structure that protects your business. Social claims made by social enterprises will be verified by Good Market. There will also be an opportunity for social enterprises to be ‘double-badged’ with existing partnerships (Social Traders, Buy Social, Social Enterprise UK and the Social Enterprise Mark).
Last but not least, the final breakout session designed to melt my brain was ‘Generative AI for Social Enterprises - 10X productivity’. A packed room as everyone was keen to learn more and Wouter Van Haaften from Generative AI Strategy had his hands full trying to answer all our questions; No Chat GPT is not the same as Google, no don’t use it as a search engine, no it’s not Google.. Instead he urged us to focus on creating better prompts, reusable templates and to essentially use Chat GPT as an intern to help create a competitive advantage. He demonstrated a practical example of how you could use it to analyze keywords used in SEO to suggest others suitable keywords. What I took away was…get better at prompts and it is worth the payment for Chat GPT V4.0 ($20 pm).
These are just a couple of my key takeaways, what I enjoyed most was having coffee and meeting countless people with inspiring stories.
As I so often do at the end of a trip I’ll leave you with my:
Highlight: Hearing Rachel Steffensen speak about the work of Firesticks Alliance, how she spoke about respecting the relationship between people and the planet was beautiful and so moving.
Lowlight: I got bitten by a mosquito in my eye…it swelled up and was a very distinctive lowpoint!
Person of the Conference: Without a doubt, Mike Curtin from DC Central Kitchen was very gracious to sit with me for an hour and endure my questions about scaling. What an inspiring story…and they are only getting started! Thanks Mike!
A quote I keep coming back to over the course of my PhD is from Robert Egger, Founder of D.C. Central Kitchen “We need to start thinking and acting together if we are to have any hope of making our efforts work”.
I’ll leave you to enjoy some ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’ which my dad taught me all the words to when I was 9 and I still remember!