In March 2019, 24 NGO workers and future change-makers came together to Poronin, Poland
for a first international activity within One Step Ahead. The six days kick-off was a great
opportunity to exchange ideas, share good practices and most importantly, explore the concept
of social entrepreneurship and plan future activities.
The whole content of the training was based on our previous experiences on promoting social
entrepreneurship. In our daily practice we get to hear a lot of questions from young people, for
example:
What is this whole social entrepreneurship? How come I can’t just open up a commercial
company? What if it is too complicated for me? Could a business like that work in a small town?
There is a lot of misconception about social entrepreneurship. Many people do not know much
about the concept, and even if they do, they are still quite scared to become the leaders and
take the initiative. That is why during the kick-off we focused on going deeper into what social
entrepreneurship really is about, what kind of benefits it can bring to the local communities and
beyond, and how to actually start one. After we made sure all of us are familiar with the concept,
we proceeded with exploring ways of researching community needs and learning the Social
Business Model Canvas. In result of this six days training we created four very concrete ideas
for social enterprises: an innovative language school in Georgia, slow-fashion company in
Moldova, social cafe in a small town of Poland, and a social integration center in Sweden.
During the next months those ideas will be researched in more details – stay tuned for more
updates from our participants who will be sharing their successes and challenges from their way
of becoming social entrepreneurs!
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