Finale conference in Hannover

On 11th of June 2014 the finale conference took place in the Ada-und-Theodor-Lessing-Volkshochschule Hannover (VHS Hannover). The institute is situated in the city-center directly vis-à-vis of the town-hall. In a warm welcome by Michael Guttmann, head of the Volkshochschule, he explained how the VHS Hannover has been getting to be involved in the subject “Social Economy” and the relation to other finished or running projects as e.g. “MESSE (Mechanism for Enhancement of Synergy and Sustainability among Enterprises)” , an Interreg IVc project in which the VHS Hannover is participating. The project’s brochures have been distributed and Cristina Marina presented the MESSE-website which includes a tool for supporting social enterprises.

Then Günter Schmatzberger from EasyBusiness in Vienna introduced in the project and gave a presentation: From the idea to the results. You can see the presentation here in the blog.

In the reports on the situation of Social Enterprises in the partners’ countries the following challenges seemed to be general:

1.       Because of the economical crisis in the last years in most countries the public subsidiaries are decreasing. That means for the Social Enterprises that they have to develop a new strategy to sell services and products and to get participants. Social Enterprises realized in this situation that they are not visible. Up to this difficult new situation they never have done real marketing und now they have to start with but they suffer a lack of knowledge.

2.       The second question in Social Economy was described as “the gap between social worker and business-management”.  The social worker who only want to do his job for support their clients and on the other hand the necessity of business-management for a stabile financing and future options. Furthermore in the most enterprises the business-management is in the hands of non-professionals as priests, social worker and so on.

In the presentations of the two invited Social Enterprises “Fairkauf” and “STEP” both topics played a roll.

Fairkauf, presented by Mr. Zielinski,  is a social warehouse in the city-center of Hannover which works today without public subsidies. Their motto is “earning money for doing good and not doing good for earning money”. Fairkauf sells clothes, books, furniture, kitchen utilities and so on, which have been donated. They never buy the products they sell, they only use donations. The profit is used for employment and training of people who have been longtime unemployed or other bad conditions for integration in the job-market.  Their strategic symbol is a flying seagull balancing in the air with its two wings: one wing is the business strategy and the other the social responsibility – both have to be in balance in a social enterprise.

Fairkauf is managed by professionals who are in retirement and volunteer their time. For sure  that is a strength and an important reason for the success of fairkauf. Fairkauf as a social warehouse had to do marketing from the first moment: they have to sell their goods and they need motivated employees.

Mr. Wyborny, general manager of “STEP = Network against substance abuse and other types of addiction” presented this social enterprise and gave a presentation about the lack of applicants with business skills and knowledge for management jobs. STEP is a limited company not for profit which means they need profit but they do not distribute the earnings. STEP works in 27 places in Lower Saxony in different kinds of establishments for addicted people (consultation centers, treatment, schooling, therapy and so on). The professionals of STEP are mostly social workers, followed by pedagogues and psychologists. The key positions in the middle-management are occupied by those professionals too, but they need management and business knowledge in this position which they never have learnt in their studies. So training for those people on the base of our curriculum should be very useful.

At the end of the following questions and answers the next steps for developing this training were described. A new project “Alliance for Business Competence” is planned and the partnership applied for subsidy in the new program of the European Commission called Erasmus+. Aim of this project would be to realize training modules and a certification system for business training in social enterprises on the curriculum developed in the running BuCoSoMa project.

All participants expressed their complete satisfaction with this interesting conference!

Renate Ackermann

Ada-und-Theodor-Lessing-Volkshochschule Hannover