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
