Thanks to sponsors Amplify Alliance Australia, Matt Pfahlert and Meg Allan represented ACRE at the 2025 Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) and Rural Gathering.
Meg Allan also represented at the Social Enterprise Open Camp in Italy, after receiving a scholarship recognising her youth leadership.
Meg shares some reflections on the experience, the enduring relevance of the Manifesto for Rural Social Enterprise and Australia’s role in the global ecosystem.
Over the past two months, I’ve had the opportunity to take part in three significant global social enterprise gatherings – the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) in Taipei, the Rural Social Enterprise Gathering in Sabah, Malaysia, and Social Enterprise Open Camp (SEOC) in Turin, Italy.
Each offered a different lens on the same question: if we are serious about building a new economy, whose ideas, practices and places are we actually learning from?
At SEWF in Taipei, the conversation was expansive and future-facing. We heard about the role of technology as a capability enabler, the importance of cross-sector collaboration, and the ambition to compete and scale in global markets. Social enterprise was positioned as a credible economic actor, capable of reshaping how economies function, not simply a feel-good add-on to traditional approaches.
It was energising; however, it also exposed a familiar tension.
Much of what was discussed assumed critical mass, economies of scale, capital and coordination – conditions that are unevenly distributed and often absent in rural contexts. This left little space to grapple with the compounded and interconnected challenges that define rural systems and the realities of rural people.
The Rural Social Enterprise Gathering in Sabah offered a clear counterpoint.
Here, social enterprises were not born from opportunity, but necessity. They were driven by care and deep connection to community, rather than aspirations of scale or systems change. Many began by responding to immediate gaps – employment, environmental stewardship, women’s empowerment, cultural preservation – challenges that, in rural contexts, are deeply interconnected, entrenched and often structurally misunderstood.
What stood out was not just the resilience or grit of the entrepreneurs in Sabah, but the way collaboration had taken shape around them. Local and federal government walked alongside communities, with trust built over time and reciprocity embedded in how people worked together. It was a reminder that resilience in rural places is not built through individual entrepreneurs’ efforts alone, but through relationships that share risk, responsibility and power.
Throughout the Rural Gathering, a familiar pattern emerged: rural social entrepreneurs started with a single challenge and found themselves working at a systems level. In rural contexts, broken systems are firmly entrenched, meaning that addressing one issue quickly reveals many others. Systems change is not a strategic ambition; it is unavoidable.
This was consistent across both the Rural Forum content and the many conversations with rural social entrepreneurs. When rural social enterprise is framed as “behind”, it is usually being measured against urban assumptions of scale, capital and influence. In practice, it is relational and context-driven, producing systems-level change with far less access to resources and support.
This understanding was reinforced at Social Enterprise Open Camp in Turin, where the focus shifted explicitly to systems change. A key takeaway for me was that transformation does not need to occur through sweeping reform. Instead, it can be cultivated through “islands of coherence” – small, intentional pockets of practice where new ways of working are tested, proven and made visible. When connected across regions, sectors and the globe, these islands can lift the broader system, reshaping it from the edges inward.
“Throughout the Rural Gathering, a familiar pattern emerged: rural social entrepreneurs started with a single challenge and found themselves working at a systems level. In rural contexts, broken systems are firmly entrenched, meaning that addressing one issue quickly reveals many others. Systems change is not a strategic ambition; it is unavoidable.”
This framing brought into focus one of the most resonant insights across the experience. Solutions developed in the most remote and constrained contexts often offer the clearest lessons for systems change. The additional time, effort and resources required to develop culturally and contextually appropriate approaches are an investment in solutions that can enable change at a systems level – or, more simply, work for communities “closer in”.
In Malaysia, Australia, Scotland, Canada and beyond, rural communities are independently arriving at remarkably similar approaches: community-led, place-based, relational and long-term. These are not isolated innovations, but coherent responses to complexity shaped by proximity, trust and lived experience.
When these rural ecosystems are connected, their collective impact far exceeds the sum of their parts. What begins to take shape is an approach to a new economy grounded in care, collaboration and local agency – and capable of addressing global challenges.
Seen through this lens, the Rural Social Enterprise Manifesto becomes more than a set of principles and recommendations. It functions as a systems change enabling document, articulating the conditions required for islands of coherence to form, connect and endure – grounded in trust, community-led decision-making, and locally defined measures of success. Its ideas surfaced repeatedly across all three gatherings, often in places where people had never encountered the Manifesto itself.
That convergence is significant. It shows we are not inventing new solutions, but giving language, structure and legitimacy to what is already working on the ground and what is needed to further enable it.
The first face-to-face meeting of the Global Rural Social Enterprise Network, held alongside the Rural Gathering, marked a shift from alignment to action. Leaders from across continents and contexts came together not to debate theory, but to test, refine and commit to advancing these shared ideas in practice. The focus was not scale for its own sake, but how to better connect, support and learn from what is already emerging in rural places.
For Australia, this global picture sharpens both the opportunity and the responsibility.
Our social enterprise ecosystem, particularly in rural areas, remains young and under-connected. Compared with Scotland’s decades of coordinated investment, or Malaysia’s close collaboration between government and community, the enabling infrastructure around rural social enterprise is still very much emerging.
And yet, rural Australia punches above its weight.
Across the country, communities are creating practical, community-led solutions with fewer resources, less infrastructure and less influence – not because they are exceptional, but because adaptability and collaboration are essential in contexts where gaps are persistent and interconnected. The challenge is not a lack of innovation, but a lack of the structures that allow these efforts to connect, compound and endure.
This is something we see clearly through our work at ACRE. Working across direct delivery, intermediary roles and field-building reinforces a simple truth: community-led entrepreneurship does not flourish in isolation. It depends on enabling conditions, on the partnerships, policy alignment, shared learning and long-term commitment that allow local practice to influence wider systems.
The task ahead is not to create more isolated examples of good work, but to better enable the islands of coherence that already exist: to connect them, resource them, and allow their collective impact to reshape how systems operate.
Across all three gatherings, one thing was clear. Rural solutions do not need permission to prove their value. Their success is already visible. The work now is collective, for practitioners, policymakers, funders and field-builders alike, to ensure community-led, place-based solutions are not treated as exceptions, but as foundational to navigating an increasingly complex global future and building an economy that genuinely works for people and planet.
ACRE gratefully acknowledges the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF), the Sabah Creative Economy & Innovation Centre (SCENIC), Social Enterprise Open Camp (SEOC) and Amplify Alliance, along with their supporters, for the scholarships and discounts that enabled participation in these gatherings. This support makes it possible for rural Australia to remain connected to, and contribute to, the global social enterprise ecosystem.