Toolkit on Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship matters for numerous reasons and plays a key role nowadays. Social entrepreneurship supports people who are marginalised or who find themselves in unjust positions due to events that are beyond their control. A social entrepreneur differs from a typical entrepreneur in that, whereas the traditional entrepreneur's ultimate purpose is to make money, the social entrepreneur's ultimate goal is to make long-term societal change.

The Toolkit on Social Entrepreneurship provides the tips and tricks necessary to start a business from the scratch. Trainees are taught not only how to conceptualize their business idea clearly, but how to plan and execute it. They gain knowledge about strategies to develop their social business model, ways to analyse it and sources of financing for start-ups. Moreover, they become aware of globally widespread problems that people are facing and the imperative need to solve them. Furthermore, once they have their business, trainees are taught about the importance of measuring their performance and strategies to do it.

This toolkit was conceived for the Erasmus+ project “Entrepreneurial Mindset for Future Youth Work”, implemented by a consortium of four partners from Romania, Italy, Poland and Turkey. The project aims to encourage entrepreneurship and unlock the growth potential of European young people, in particular NEETs.

The purpose of this toolkit is to assist youth workers, trainers and educators to introduce and organize new training courses and enhance the existing training materials, to further deliver effective training to youth in the field of social entrepreneurship.

This support toolkit comprises a set of approaches and methodologies that can be used in Europe to support young people, particularly NEETs and disadvantaged young people, who would like to start a business in the social entrepreneurship field. The toolkit is designed as an accessible document giving a course of action for youth workers on how to attract, involve, activate and train disadvantaged young people.

In order to have a full understanding of the topic as well as to improve the competences of youth workers, trainers and educators to organize and deliver social entrepreneurship courses in the online environment, the content has been structured as follows:

• Module 1. Social entrepreneurship
• Module 2. Sustainable Development Goals
• Module 3. Impact of social entrepreneurship on society
• Module 4. Creating social enterprises
• Module 5. Business idea
• Module 6. SOAR analysis for creating a value proposition
• Module 7. Business models
• Module 8. Social business models
• Module 9. Pitch your business
• Module 10. Funding opportunities
• Module 11. Measuring performance
• Module 12. Marketing strategies

The above modules contain the knowledge that youth workers need in order to provide adequate support to young people for the development of a business, with a particular focus on social entrepreneurship training (e.g. Sustainable development Goals, Social Business Model Canvas, SOAR, etc.).

In this toolkit, the authors proposed a set of useful tools for youth workers to provide training on social entrepreneurship. These tools range from classic training tools to multimedia ones, all being intended to adapt the course to the needs and specificities of the target group.

Finally, the youth workers, trainers and educators will be able to understand how to introduce young people in an innovative way to European funding mechanisms, help them develop an entrepreneurial idea and know the existing tools to put it into practice.