Exploiting Potentials of Social Enterprises through Standardized European Evaluation and Development System
In 2011, the European Commission launched the Social Business Initiative (SBI)2 in a recognition of the growing social economy & entrepreneurship that accounts for more than 11 millions of workers, 4.5 % of the active EU population. Since then, a lot has been achieved (e.g. the European Social Entrepreneurship Fund, Social Stock Exchanges), however, policies addressed to social enterprises are still under-developed and fragmented in most Member States. Motivated by the above challenge, SOCIAL SEEDS partnership aims to equip policy-makers with evidence-based policy diagnostic tool that increases the effectiveness of local and regional policies for stimulation of growth & employment (preferably of vulnerable social groups) in social enterprises (SE) including their eco-systems in European cities and regions. To this end, regional and local government-run measurement and labelling scheme addressed to social enterprises (SE) will be established. It will help policy-makers’ concrete actions towards creating the right conditions to allow the sector to thrive. This new scheme will be fully exploitable - regardless of sectors, size of enterprises, maturity - and aligned throughout three different policy-making spheres enabling consensus between bottom-up and top-down implications. Although, similar issues related to strengthening the position of SEs within the private & public sphere has already been part of EU development agendas for many years, but the focus on ranking and benchmarking regional and local SEs according to policy metrics is new. Therefore, SOCIAL SEEDS partners believe that the achievements will efficiently contribute to shaping European policymaking as well as engage multi-stakeholders in the way policies are generated, implemented and monitored.