Position paper: self-employment for refugee and humanitarian entrants

Refugees are consistently the most entrepreneurial migrants in Australia. Yet the systems designed to support them actively disincentive starting a small businesses.

While resource-poor in many ways, our experience  is that refugees are rich when it comes to self-employment ideas. Ideas that can change their economic and social circumstances from dependence to full participation.

What is missing is appropriate and culturally sensitive opportunities for refugee self-employment. Until now.

 

Position paper: what is systems change and why should we bother?

To understand and change global systems, we need to understand how the different parts of the system interact and affect each other, which actors are affecting the system and what motivates them. But how do you do that?

We propose two practical ways to get to to grips with systems change: combining ‘Critical Theory’ with the ‘power and systems approach’. We need to engage with global systems at a local level. And we must reflect on ourselves as much as the external system we seek to change.

 

Submission: Victorian Government Social Enterprise Strategy

Our submission to the Victorian Government’s renewed social enterprise strategy, based on our engagement with the Australian social enterprise sector since the 1990s. Our submission is based on the conviction that governments can apply their resources effectively to enable social enterprises to prosper and deliver social and environmental benefits across a broad spectrum of the community, to make a significant contribution to the wellbeing of all their citizens.

 

 

Social Enterprise Business Model Toolkit

The social enterprise business model toolkit includes tips and tools to innovate or create a social enterprise business model. It offers 17 business model types and a seven step process to business model design.

It’s based on 92 international journal articles and interviews with leaders of social enterprise peak bodies in the UK that support over ten thousand social enterprises.

 

From competition to collaboration in the UK

This thesis for a Masters in Social Innovation examines the ‘collective impact’ approach to cross-sector collaboration in addressing entrenched and systemic social challenges in the UK. It explores the conditions required to make collective impact work in the UK through an analysis of barriers and enablers, drawing on international collective impact literature and two London-based collective impact projects – The Finance Innovation Lab and West London Zone. It is argued that the key to developing collective impact in the UK is a new generation of independent, third sector backbone organisations that are sufficiently funded, promoted and supported.

 

Definition and Theory in Social Innovation

This is a paper written by Tara and Andrew as part of their Masters in Social Innovation. It explores different definitional approaches or intentions – legitimating, theoretical, action-reflection, broad and distinctive – and considers why a definition of social innovation is important and what the crucial ingredients, informed more by practice than theory, might be. Following lessons learnt from postmodernity and critical theory, social marketing, democracy, governance and social entrepreneurship, we arrive at a definition that is value-laden, distinctive and focused – from inception to impact – on equality, justice and empowerment.

 

Marketing for Good Tool Kit

The Marketing for Good Tool Kit offers practical guidelines for conducting strategic and customer-centred marketing programs in a not-for-profit or social enterprise context. It’s a guide for marketing decisions in four key strategic areas: marketing strategy; market research; campaign implementation; and, marketing metrics and measurement. It was established by Dragonfly Collective Director Tara Anderson through the Australian Marketing Institute to encourage better marketing practices for bigger social impact.