Stories of Change

WHY – THE NEED

Rural entrepreneurship often surfaces in the form of social enterprise in communities where businesses are created or maintained to provide services and products in a response to social or economic needs in the community that are not being met by the market.

As social enterprise is in its infancy in Australia, ACRE is focused on working with governments wanting to strategically invest in and grow social enterprise in their communities.

Through developing a supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem across rural Victoria, ACRE aims to bring resources to people with ideas and energy and support them to strengthen their communities.

It is important to ignite entrepreneurship and create an entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to encourage and harness the untapped potential that exists within our rural communities.

HOW – THE APPROACH

Since 2017, ACRE has been working in partnership with Rural Councils Victoria (RCV) to deliver cross- sector learning workshops across the 38 RCV member councils. These facilitated workshops deliberately bring together leaders from government, community, education and business to learn about social enterprise.

Social Enterprise is used as a proven methodology for learning, as it engages all sector leaders (regardless of background) in activities that are designed to build social and economic capital simultaneously. Social enterprise is an international movement that is supporting communities to transition from a reliance on government funding and donations to providing a sustainable vehicle for community rejuvenation.

Between September 2017 and December 2019, 24 Understanding Social Enterprise learning programs were delivered across rural Victoria, from Swan Hill in the North West to Bairnsdale in the South East, Tallangatta in the North East to Hamilton in the South West.

Participants who took part in the Understanding Social Enterprise learning program:

• Defined the values and purpose of a social enterprise to better understand where it sits in relation to the commercial and voluntary sector
• Explored opportunities and drivers, such as managing a triple bottom line to understand what issues might be faced in developing and managing a social enterprise
• Used tools and resources to help plan for and assess the potential of social enterprise ideas
• Examined the range of organisational and legal structures available to social enterprises to comprehend the variety of types of social enterprise models
• Identified business models and support available to social enterprise to enable access to further information for their own needs
• Discussed real life examples of social enterprise to deepen their understanding of the realities of setting up and running a social enterprise
• Planned the development of their role in the sector to enable follow on from the learning program

WHERE

Rural Victoria