Social Enterprise Development, Education and Training Tools Erasmus Project

Project Title

Social Enterprise Development, Education and Training Tools

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The SEDETT (Social Enterprise Development Education and Training Tools) project was a partnership of eight organisations (HEIs, training, community and youth advice organisations) from the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, that was formed to explore factors affecting the sustainability of social enterprises from Oct 2016 – Oct 2018. The context for the project was that social enterprises recognize that they cannot rely on the continued availability of public funds to remain sustainable as businesses. Social enterprises need to have the capacity to attract investors in order to be sustainable and continue to deliver their goods and services. In addition, higher education and vocational training providers have a role to play in ensuring social enterprises remain sustainable by developing relevant curricula with appropriate learning resources that reflect social enterprise practitioners’ experiences. Social enterprises also needed to learn in order to achieve their own organisational development and this can be enhanced through the use of creative learning experiences that allow practitioners to develop their soft skills. Therefore this project aimed to:-
• Produce a social enterprise capacity assessment tool (SECAT) for practitioners to use for self-evaluating their organisational
development.
• Produce learning resources for educators and trainers to use when developing inter-active course materials on social enterprise
development.
• Provide examples of resources for educators and trainers to use as creative learning experiences for social enterprise organisational
development.
The aims were achieved through case study research undertaken with over sixty key actors in twenty-two different types of social enterprise organisations that were located in the partners’ home countries. The synthesis of the collected data allowed an inter-active SECAT to be developed and blended open access e-learning materials to be generated which will facilitate personalized and organisational learning at differing levels of engagement. The project outputs were refined and developed in four workshop/training events that included locally based practitioners. The target groups for this project were students, teachers, trainers, partners’ institutions, research centres, careers and youth advisory agencies, policy-makers, existing social enterprises and their staff seeking to achieve development.

The impacts of the project outputs include (i) the increased awareness and knowledge of social enterprise development at local, national and EU level; (ii) the availability of the SEDETT toolkit of open access blended e-learning materials for formal and in-formal courses of education and training; (iii) the use of the SECAT by practitioners to develop organisational capacity in the social enterprise sector across Europe, and (iv) the potential incorporation of the innovative learning methods into partner organisations education and training approaches. The innovative outputs of the project have contributed to the EMES research agenda on innovation in social enterprise and support the key priorities set out in the Europe 2020 Education and Training Strategy.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 269660 Eur

Project Coordinator

GLYNDWR UNIVERSITY/PRIFYSGOL GLYNDWR & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Archivio della Memoria
• Globalnet sp. z o.o.
• Asociación de Ayuda y Acción Social Misión Urbana de Sevilla
• VSJ INOVACIJU BIURAS
• Centrul Judetean de Resurse si Asistenta Educationala Iasi
• Pathways: Inspirational Development C.I.C.
• LIMERICK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY