5 approaches to help social entrepreneurs thrive
Social entrepreneurs need much of the same support as regular entrepreneurs. Sales, finance, product development, industry expertise, and funding are all core skills. But they also face a range of unique challenges that come with the territory.
Year Here holds over a decade of valuable knowledge on how to support social entrepreneurs to start ventures, thrive in work and scale impact.
We want to share our learning to support the current and future initiatives designed to nurture social entrepreneurs.
1. Create intentional environments to gather insights and simulate social impact ideation
The challenge:
Many incubators and accelerators assume that the ideation bit is ‘done’ and the idea just needs accelerating.
However, this is often not the case within social impact. This is because few social entrepreneurs come from frontline roles, as these positions are poorly paid and damn hard, or have lived experience because systemic inequality locks these folks out of entrepreneurship.
All our Fellows join with a passion to tackle social issues but not all come with the deep insight or social innovation ideas to address them.
Our approach:
We addressed this gap by providing placement opportunities on the frontline of social issues to offer a deeper level of understanding. This fueled ideas such as Pivot, which was born out of insights gained in the YMCA by its founder Alice Moxley.
Ask yourself:
How might your programme support not only the incubation and acceleration of ideas but also opportunities for insight and ideation?
2. Standard entrepreneurial practices might not be appropriate, so offer tailored support
The challenge:
Widely accepted entrepreneurial advice is not always applicable to social impact ventures working with vulnerable or historically marginalised communities, as it could cause more harm than good.
Our approach:
Social impact programmes need to be tailored.
Much of the Lean Startup rhetoric is to be action-oriented and fail fast. Indeed, “move fast and break things” was an internal motto used at Facebook.
We, too, encourage iterative prototyping and testing of ideas, concepts and business models to develop what works. But when the innovation ‘sand pit’ is working with vulnerable communities, excluded groups, and those with health challenges or disabilities, ‘fail fast’ needs to be applied in sensitive, ethical ways with due consideration for unintended impacts or significant negative consequences on people’s lives.
Our programme, co-designed with social impact experts over a decade, provided training in design, enterprise and social impact and included sessions such as “Trauma Informed Practice” and “Designing Inclusive Services” alongside cash flow analysis and no code prototyping.
Ask yourself:
How might social innovation practice redefine the culture of Lean Startup to work in more ethical, inclusive and sustainable ways?
3. Prepare social entrepreneurs for the current funding and investment landscape
The challenge:
Accessing funds and investment is hard for any start-up, but is especially for early-stage social ventures.
Social impact grants are limited, highly competitive and require high due diligence standards for a very small amount of money.
Charitable funders often have a low-risk appetite, but this is at odds with the risk required to test very early social innovations.
Venture capital models generally demand rapid scaling and rapid returns, which social entrepreneurs’ business models are not always set up for
Our approach:
At Year Here we provided training from real-world faculty working in finance and funding to help prepare social entrepreneurs.
Our Crowdbacker events aimed to plug the early-stage funding gap by crowdsourcing seed funding and raised more than £100K over the past decade. However, this did not come without its challenges, including the very significant amount of resources that went into events for very small amounts of funding for each venture.
The Year Here incubator evolved to become a programme that connected founders to onward support and funding.
There are now a number of businesses that have successfully raised further funds and investments including Chatterbox, Tranquiliti and Cogs.
Ask yourself:
What preparation might you offer to support social entrepreneurs to set up to harness the funds and investment currently available, or how might we collectively shift the funding landscape?
4. Provide pastoral care to support emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing
The challenge:
Social entrepreneurship is emotionally and mentally draining.
Every one of our 265 Fellows was stretched by our 10-month programme. Not only were they tackling some of society’s most challenging issues and learning new skills, but also building a future career or venture at the same time.
In addition, the motivation for many of our Fellows is lived experience of challenges or trauma, which drives their innovations.
Every entrepreneur is driven by an understanding of a need, opportunity or gap to drive their ventures and innovations. But instead of creating solutions to make things more convenient — taxi app, ingredient and recipe delivery, or home film streaming — our fellows created InCommon to tackle the crisis of isolation and loneliness among older people; Pocket Power to help families living in poverty have more income by switching utility bills; Breakthrough the UK’s first apprenticeship provider to recruit direct from prisons.
This type of innovation requires deeper emotional support and guidance.
Our approach:
Much of this positive challenge and stretch fuelled the inspiring outcomes of the programme, but over the years, we have learned how important formal care was for both Fellows and our team.
We designed and set up our care along similar lines to the pastoral care offered in educational institutions to ensure the physical and emotional welfare of our Fellows.
By our final Fellowship, we had a Pastoral Lead role and provided support in a range of ways. We offered group drop-ins, 1:1s, coaching, harnessed affordable therapy services such as Spill and used professional occupational health expertise where deeper support was needed.
Ask yourself:
If you are designing an entrepreneurial support programme, what emotional support might you need to put in place to enable people to participate and thrive?
5. Nurture deep, wide and lasting connections and network
The challenge:
Social entrepreneurship can be stressful, risky and emotionally draining.
Founders and innovators are constantly stepping into the unknown and experimenting with new approaches that have not been tried before. They might be building something from scratch with no previous experience in accounting or law or tech or marketing or sales.
Entrepreneurship can also be incredibly lonely and demanding on your time and personal relationships.
Our approach:
The most valuable support for social entrepreneurs is to enable them to build their social capital. The Fellowship programme created opportunities for social entrepreneurs to build across the three types of social capital; bonding, bridging and linking.
Bonding Social Capital describes the strong and deep connections between similar groups of people. These deep connections were formed within cohorts of Fellows over the year spent together.
“I’ve found my people, and I know that we are going to be connected for life after this experience.” — Fellow feedback.
Bridging Social Capital defines the relationships made between different groups who would otherwise not connect. Year Here’s regular pitching panels introduced wide-ranging experts to Fellows enabling them to link with people across different sectors and markets.
The founder of Appt, Hector Hector Smethurst, first met Pye Nyunt of Barking and Dagenham Council when he pitched to a panel of volunteers. Impressed by his pitch, Pye introduced him to his local contacts in the health system, who went on to become some of Appt’s early major customers.
Linking Social Capital is the value of the connection between people vertically across hierarchies or socioeconomic groups. At Year Here, this value was often built through the mentor relationships facilitated for Fellows.
MJ, the founder of Just Once, was connected with a mentor at the bank UBS. The relationship they struck up has been sustained, and now Chris Kennedy sits on the board of the enterprise.
Ask yourself:
If your role supports future social entrepreneurs, how might you support them in building their social capital to enable them to access their own support and help into the future?
If you’d like to explore more about the Year Here Fellowship, our story, impact and network, visit our legacy site here.
