Community Enterprise - Social Economy Scotland/SCR Profile

At Community Enterprise Ltd, we ran ‘Trading Up’ to test an approach to business growth for social economy organizations. Organizations were helped to move from being dependant on grants to generating their own income.

We did this by developing business and leadership skills, and promoting a change of culture by encouraging entrepreneurship and risk-taking. We are a social enterprise ourselves, and have a mixture of business and community experience. In total we worked with 84 organizations.

We were a Social Economy Scotland (SES) pilot project. SES is a Development Partnership funded by the European Community’s EQUAL initiative.

What were the issues?

Our past experience of managing a fund which has provided start-up grants to help organizations develop a new business idea, and feedback from our business development work, highlighted a number of issues:

• Many social economy organizations are still dependent on grants

• Management of these organizations is unlikely to make the move to become more business-like without specific support

• Organizations often lack the means to buy in support to help them start looking at ways of generating income.

• Organizations are not likely to turn to business support aimed at the for-profit sector

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