The following recommendations on social economy enterprises have been developed by the SEEING partners based on their experiences with the project.
Project partners identified the need to:
- Try and adopt a broader viewpoint that looks further than just the social enterprise sector.
- Work more collaboratively, especially with the key ‘players’ or ‘influencers’ in the social enterprise sector and local government.
- Clearly set out a rationale for projects like this i.e. why do we need to do this? What benefits will this work bring?
- Clearly set out some goals to achieve i.e. what will success look like?
- Make sure your organisation has sufficient time and resources to see the project through until the very end.
- Be flexible. The planned outcomes may not actually be achievable due to lack of time, resources etc.
- Add time into the project to allow for language and cultural differences.
Partners would recommend to the European Commission:
- That the importance of social enterprise in integrated into the decision making process. For example in the UK the Public Services Social Value Act 2012 makes provision for social enterprise to bid for public service contracts.
- They should see social value as a more important measureable outcome than the precise legal structure of the organisation. The social economy is a spectrum (running from the voluntary sector to the private sector), rather than a separate sector.
- That they offer more financial support for social enterprises, as some organisations will never be able to get all their income from commerce.
- That they continue to support the work started by the SEEING project in the long-term, as otherwise the momentum and interest created by the project will be lost.
The English partners have collaborated with the Marchmont Observatory through the course of the SEEING project and developed recommendations and a final legacy report targeted at their local context: