Social Economy Scotland

Logo for Social Economy Scotland www.socialeconomyscotland.info 

Description

SES image

Background

The Scottish government has recognised the important role that social economy organisations play in supporting the regeneration of communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Although there has been significant growth in the sector in Scotland over the past five years, there is a clear need to provide specialist business support to enable the sector to enter new markets and increase its capacity to deliver public services, thereby increasing their sustainability. Particular issues for the social economy are as follows:
1. Organisational/sectoral issues
  • A need to enhance capacity and entrepreneurial drive to compete with other potential providers of public services.
  • A need to demonstrate and promote the social/community benefits that contracting with social economy providers can provide.
  • A weak financial infrastructure, lack of stability in income streams, and an over reliance on short-term grant funding.
  • Lack of clarity concerning the roles of the various support agencies.
2. Workforce issues
  • High proportion of part-time/temporary and short-term contracts/lack of job security.
  • Lack of career paths and development opportunities; particularly within small to medium-sized organisations and for women moving into senior management.
  • Lack of skills/qualifications in specific growth sectors and skills gaps in management competences.
  • Disabled, black and ethnic minority staff tend to be employed in specific sub-sectors such as social welfare/disability and equality and law respectively. 
3. Future workforce (including volunteers)
  • Lack of awareness of employment opportunities in the sector.
  • Volunteering is undervalued as a route into the sector and into employment.
  • Unemployed, long-term sick, disabled, people on lowest incomes and from ethnic minorities are under-represented in volunteering.

Aims

Through partnership working and transnational cooperation, Social Economy Scotland has been supporting the social economy to increase its role in the delivery of innovative, high-quality services, thereby enhancing its contribution to community regeneration, sustainable economic development and labour market integration in Scotland.

Objectives

  • Growing organisations to support small to medium-sized social economy organisations with aspirations to reduce grant dependency, enhance sustainability, create new jobs and develop new products and services to better meet the needs of their communities.
  • Developing people to support the development of skills and professionalism in the sector, in order to develop the social economy’s role on labour market integration.
  • Promoting culture change to encourage dialogue between public agencies and representatives of the social economy (at National, UK and European levels), which fosters mutual understanding and promotes good practice in partnership working.

Social Economy Scotland has been harnessing the knowledge, expertise, and resources to address some of these key barriers to growth, thus enabling the social economy to improve the quality of jobs, tackle labour market disadvantage more effectively, and create a more sustainable social economy sector.

Target groups

Strengthening the social economy reaches many groups of disadvantaged people, including unemployed, employed, migrants, people with disabilities, BME groups. 

Round

2

Round 1 to Round 2

Social Economy Scotland participated in Round One as Strengthening the Social Economy Partnership. Whilst the Round One project raised the visibility of the social economy in Scotland, the Round Two work has been focusing on influencing mainstream agencies in terms of the development of the sector.

Lead partner

Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) >>

Core partners

Careers Scotland >>
Forth Sector >>
Highlands & Islands Enterprise >>
North Lanarkshire Council >>
Scottish Centre for Regeneration >>
Scottish Enterprise Glasgow >>
Scottish Government - Social Enterprise Team >>
Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition - SSEC >>
Social Economy Unit >>
Social Firms Glasgow >>
Social Investment Scotland >>
Volunteer Development Scotland >>

Transnational partnerships

Information for Transnational partnerships

End-dates

Action 2: 30 June 2007
Action 3: 31 December 2007

Equal theme

Social economy

Origins

Impact arts

The lead partner, SCVO (Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations), has existed in various guises since 1939. It seeks to advance the values and shared interests of the voluntary sector by building the voluntary sector's capacity, strengthening governance and increase the effectiveness of the voluntary sector’s infrastructure. The partnership established for the Equal Round One project has been extended to deliver the Round Two activity.

Achievements

Impact arts

Testing SROI methodology in practice

Social Return on Investment (SROI) identifies and describes the social value being created through an organisation’s activities (and the investment needed to deliver them). Uniquely, it seeks to place a financial value on this social value. Using a set of financial accounting principles and standard calculations, SROI analyses produce (as part of a wider report) an 'index of social return'. An index of 2:1 shows that for every £1 invested, £2 worth of social value is returned.

In Scotland, a number of partners decided to explore these issues further by testing the SROI
methodology in practice with a bigger and more diverse set of organisations than had
previously been the case.


Nursery

Using SROI as a predictor of future social return

Development work also took place to explore the potential for using SROI as a 'predictor' of future social return. Crucially, discussions were held with investors to explore their thoughts and considerations in terms of using SROI in the longer term.


St Mary's Place

Wealth of reports of the findings and good practice

The final report is the culmination of the process of testing the methodology and sets out a series of key lessons learnt, practical guidance on using and developing SROI analyses, and recommendations for future work in this area.

There is a wealth of other reports giving the detail of the work carried out, together with evaluation reports of every aspect of the project.


man

Looking to the future and the role of SROI

The third sector is at a crossroads. There is a changing funding relationship with the public sector, with a greater emphasis on contracts (purchasing) and investment alongside a corresponding decline in traditional grant funding.

The effect of this change is that there is growing pressure on the third sector to prove its value and justify investment decisions. Social Return on Investment is a tool that can aid the sector to do this. It is also a tool that can help purchasers and investors to make more intelligent decisions on how to spend limited resources. But the approach is still in its infancy and further investment is required in the development of SROI to ensure that it is robust and fit for purpose.

Intended impact/ sustainability

The DP is intending to raise the profile of the social economy from a low baseline: 96% of respondents felt the activities of social economy organisations were not sufficiently well known. Any measurable increase will have an impact on the readiness and sustainability of organisations, on the personal capability of their people, and on sustainabile partnership working.

Scatter plot

Process
PracticeX
Product
PolicyXX
CityLocalRegionalNationalEuropean

Practice/European

Partnership links and evidenced effectiveness of procurement-based projects and financial instruments for supporting social enterprise will exhibit models applicable across Europe.

Policy/Local

The DP expects to inform policy to grow the social economy in Scotland. Key areas include: testing ‘public-social partnership’ as a model of service delivery, developing a ‘procurement standard’ for the social economy, demonstrating quality assurance and ensuring that organisations are ‘fit for purpose’; demonstrating how the social economy can add value, and measure this value added - testing a range of impact measurement tools (including ‘social return on investment’).

Policy/European

Partnership links and evidenced effectiveness of procurement-based projects and financial instruments for supporting social enterprise will exhibit models applicable across Europe.

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Connections

Main outputs

Printable document
Making the Case: Social Added Value Guide >> Guide to help organisations working in the social economy to demonstrate the ‘social added value’ that is intrinsic to the services they deliver.


Printable document
Policy briefing papers >> The Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition (SSEC) hs been developing a series of policy briefings as part of EQUAL Social Economy Scotland (SES)’s Mainstreaming programme.


Printable document
Social Return on Investment reports >>Series of reports of a variety of social enterprises established as part of the Equal programme.


Printable document
Social Return on Investment: Investing in Impact >>The final report sets out a series of key lessonslearned, practical guidance on using and developing SROI analyses, and recommendations for future work in this area.


Activities and products

Activity
Enterprise Accelerator >>Development trusts are growing across Scotland and making a real difference in regenerating the communities in which they are based.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
Good Moves into the social economy >> This pilot has been developing an infrastructure to encourage individuals with higher level skills to make the social economy sector their career destination of choice, in order to enable the social economy to increase its role in the delivery of high quality services.


Activity
Growing the Social Economy with Graduates >> This pilot has been using the skills of recent graduates to create a peripatetic graduate team providing support to targeted social economy organisations that have indicated a need for business support in areas such as marketing and IT development.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
HISEZ CIC (Highlands and Islands Enterprise Zone Community Interest Company) >> The HISEZ project is the development of a new company, limited by guarantee, known as HISEZ Ltd.Expand/collapse Products (2)


Activity
Lanarkshire Social Economy >> This pilot focuses on two areas of development: cluster development and the design of ‘The Lanarkshire Quality Standard’.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
LSEP Development Fund >> A fund of £100,000 has been approved for Local Social Economy Partnerships (LSEPs) to submit bids of up to £15,000.


Activity
Public Social Partnerships >> This pilot focuses on the development of public-social partnerships and aims to test this model as a way to create new aspiring social enterprises based on public procurement opportunities.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
Raising the profile of the social economy >> Social Economy Scotland has been tackling its mainstreaming work within five themes: partnership and procurement new approaches to finance quality and impact business support raising the profile.Expand/collapse Products (2)


Activity
S2S (Social to Social) >> S2S, Scotland's first national social enterprise trade fair, took place in Perth on 25 April 2006.Expand/collapse Products (1)


ActivitySEEN (Social Economy Exchange Network) is a transnational partnership
SEEN (Social Economy Exchange Network) >> Over the lifetime of the project, the SEEN (Social Economy Exchange Network) partners worked together to undertake a range of activities including the sharing of information and experience, parallel development of innovative approaches, and the exchange of staff.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
Social Equity Scotland >> The project has been focusing on the following areas: defining what is meant by ‘social venture’, covering charities, revenue-generating social enterprises, socially driven businesses, legal structures and charitable status the ‘patient capital gap’ covering the need for additional types of risk capital, the influence of Futurebuilders Scotland and the developing market for loan finance in Scotland the social venture market in Scotland, covering the size of the market across Scotland and types of ventures that might be supported by investment capital.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
Social Return on Investment (SROI) >> This pilot has been developing and testing approaches to SROI and identifying whether SROI is an applicable model for assessing the impact of investment funding.


Activity
Trading Up >> This initiative has been piloting a comprehensive, targeted business growth service for social economy organisations/enterprises.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Activity
Volunteering Impact Measurement >> Volunteers make an enormous contribution to the social economy, but no quantitative measure of this contribution is currently available.Expand/collapse Products (1)


Printable document
Better Value: purchasing public services from the social economy >> The key message of this guide, which is part of the Futurebuilders Scotland programme, is to demonstrate to public bodies the advantages of contracting with the social economy .


Database
Key contacts list >>The Key Contacts List has been developed for organisations that are interested in accessing public procurement opportunities in Scotland.


Database
Social Economy and Enterprise Database Scotland (SEEDS) >> Social Economy Scotland has developed databases to enable users to search for social economy organisations in Scotland using a variety of parameters.


DVD
Social Enterprise - working across Scotland DVD >> A new promotional DVD 'Social Enterprise - working across Scotland' produced by Kibble Education and Care Centre and Indigo Project Solutions is being launched at a dinner event on 12th June in Renfrew.


Printable document
Summary of support programme >> Summary of the EQUAL Strengthening the Social Economy support programme for Local Social Economy Partnerships.


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