A factory for social entrepreneurship

Social enterprises of er a valuable model for youth work. How to set them up was the focus of a seminar for 24 youth workers that took place in July 2011, with participants from the EU and Eastern Europe. The starting point was that social entrepreneurship offers a double advantage: it can help sustain many NGOs struggling with financial issues as grants get harder to find, and it offers some innovative ways of introducing young people to the world of work, and even of creating employment. Youth workers from Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Sweden and Ukraine explored the topic as an opportunity for youth work. They discussed how to develop the abilities of people working with youth — particularly with young people from ethnic minorities — and how to make young people more competitive in the labour market. The seminar did not suggest that social entrepreneurship is a universal model for the trouble-free work of a youth organisation, but it did identify where opportunities exist, how they can be seized with imagination and initiative, and what skills are most useful in exploiting the opportunities. The seminar employed the methods of non-formal teaching, encouraging the exchange of experience from different countries to alert the participants to opportunities they had not been aware of, along with theoretical and practical exercises, and simulations of entrepreneurship challenges.There was agreement on the need to develop the competences of people working with youth, so that they were better equipped to build links between youth work and social enterprises. h e participants acquired new capacities for counselling, and for supporting the creation and development of Youth Factories of Social Entrepreneurship in their own countries as part of Youth in Action, so that social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills would be promoted among young people.