The SocialFokus journey.
About a year ago couple of friends and I decided to explore social entrepreneurship as a possible solution to some of the problems that Hungary faces. Here’s a summary of our journey so far and the challenges that we’re keen to tackle in 2016.
Start shallow.
I’ve recently attended a workshop on collaborative decision-making where we explored shallow vs. deep collaboration. SocialFokus’ journey definitely started on the shallow end. I came to New Zealand and found myself working for a social business accelerator. The more I’ve learnt about the concept through facilitating a 10-week program the more I started to feel deeply connected to the concept of solving social issues via sustainable businesses. It didn’t take me too long to realize that once I’m back home in Eastern Europe I should start something around social businesses. The first step was to get the research done so I can formulate a basic concept in my head. Once I had a vague idea I started to pitch it for various people and recruit a team who share similar values. According to XY recruitment is the key activity of shallow collaboration and many organizations stuck on this level. “I (again I) have a vision and come help me executing it because you have the skills.” I knew I wanted a different approach that allows the collective to explore its potential. But can you jump into a deeper level of collaboration while you’re building a team in Hungary from New Zealand via Skype?
I came to a realisation that the answer was no. But it was a no that was born organically. What I mean is that we let ourselves to navigate through the ups and downs and explore our common path with the premise that it might be a dead end road. Luckily we ended up taking the first major step towards deepening our collaboration by downloading the knowledge and thought process I gained around social businesses and transfer it to the core team. That move allowed us to better understand problems that we’re trying solve and to start building the mutual support network around SocialFokus. I remember that I was sitting in this Internet cafe in Cambodia building our first website while trying to convince the Brain Bar Budapest team to provide us the opportunity to run a workshop together with Daniel Epstein from Unreasonable. In the meantime the team back home was validating the problem by talking to key stakeholders and social entrepreneurs. We were rocking things along an unspoken vision which was to shape Hungarian society through building conscious companies
We ended up kicking off our operation in Budapest by delivering our first workshop together with the local Impact Hub team and Unreasonable Institute. It was a major hit for us. 80 crazy changemakers showed up who has given us the support to keep on walking down on the path. At the end of August 2015 we delivered a 6-day InnoCamp for 13 Hungarian participants. We’ve prototyped a course that focuses on building businesses as much as explores the participants’ whys and fear of failure. We provided them tools that allows them build the layout of their social venture both from a business and a personal development perspective.
We were truly buzzing after the InnoCamp and our faith in Hungary was given back to us. This crazy journey opened up further doors and six months later we can proudly say that we contributed towards some great projects including Kitchen Budapest’s Format project, the Global Social Business Summit’s Refugee Action Tank, New Zealand’s Live the Dream social entrepreneurial accelerator, Engame’s educational service and Unreasonable’s Labs.
Deepen to grow.
A year later I’m back in New Zealand on a short-term project. As I was easing into 2016 while being outdoors in the nature at a conscious festival with no technology, I had the brain space to reflect on 2015. I’ve found three major challenges that we as a group are facing on a daily basis.
How can we showcase the difference between non-profits and social ventures for Hungarian people? How can we create funding for that activity (socially and environmentally conscious projects) in an Eastern European country where we face challenges like a recently published 4M EUR social business related EU funding that can only be won by two pre-defined non-profit companies? Lastly, how can we satisfy our Millennial peers’ desire to work on businesses that focuses more on people and purpose rather than profit?
As we were talking about these questions with the team we all expressed our intentions for 2016. One of the main conclusion was that we all want to ‘do’. And by that we mean we all want to do businesses there are socially and environmentally conscious. By building these business we can provide hand-on examples, make profit that can be channeled into mission-driven projects and create a working environment that allows Millennials to thrive.
While we were deepening our collaboration to the engagement level within SocialFokus I realized that I’m flatting with some cool people from Enspiral. They’re building this CEO-less virtual and physical network of companies and professionals working together to create a better society. They are pretty much on the verge of cracking similar problems with a structure that is evolving for quite some years now. Their open-source recipe is to build various businesses and collaborate with some existing ones to collaboratively fund projects that are proposed by people from the network. They are using the mechanism of business to build social ventures without depending on corporate or private donations let alone government funding.
At SocialFokus we are very curious whether this structure can be implemented in a highly individualist, paternalist and masculine cultural setting such as Hungary. We’re dying to know whether our friends and peers (and potentially you) are ready to think and act collectively and start making Hungary happen together. We are keen to deepen our collaboration by sharing both the power and the responsibility amongst the network.
2016.
So in 2016 we’ll be working on experimenting the Enspiral way of doing things in the hub of Eastern European. And we are going to do that along three directions that are currently interesting for the team: technology related marketing, sustainable food production and workshop design and facilitation.
But we don’t want to stop here! Would you like to be part of a network that shares resources to collaboratively build conscious companies for a better Hungary? If so, get in touch :)
