A group of 11 interested people met at NationsHeart Friday 1 May for discussion regarding the $650m Jobs Fund initiative offered by the Rudd government to nonprofits, community and government organisations to stimulate the economy. The following is a summary of this rather exciting meeting.
I introduced the participants and the reason for the meeting. I shared the goals of NationsHeart Christian Community to form a new nonprofit (tax-deductible) Company Limited by Guarantee (named NationsHeart Connect) which will oversee the Community Connections projects currently functioning through NationsHeart. I emphasised that our purpose to create a community which values individuals and provides a place of belonging. Through our Social Services and Social Enterprises we are fulfilling this goal.
Janet McKinney shared the groundrules for the Job Fund. We qualify to apply for the $200m offered for Getting Communities Working which will provide seed funding for social enterprises with a view to sustain and increase employment in the community. The first round of the Jobs Fund ends 22 May 2009. Our goal is to get some proposal on the table to the government by that date.
I then talked about the concept of Social Enterprise providing a definition and criteria for these businesses.
Social enterprises are businesses whose bottom line is to benefit society or the community and profits from the business are channeled back to the business or to the community for benefit.
Social enterprises are characterised by having hte following 7 components: an explicit social aim; a commercial orientation; a business activity; an enterpreneurial drive; it uses profits for community benefit; its social owned; finally, its socially accountable. We spent some time discussing these criteria.
We then talked about ideas out there for social enterprise. Of course it's impossible to replicate the discussion and even the spirit of said discussion here, I would like to say that everyone shared openly and a sense of passion was felt as people discussed their points of view, their vision for reaching the community and their desire to be a part of something which would bring change to the community.
I would like to summarise what was discussed by looking at the layers of the onion which seemed to be developing as the discussion ensued.
The outside of the onion is the overall thrust of what we would see we could do in Belconnen. The group expressed its desire to help those people experiencing disadvantage or disability which kept them from entering some of the most basic of training for employments (e.g. CIT or apprentiseships). There was a feeling that there is a great number of people growing up in our communities who cannot and will not accesss these kinds of training structures without previous intervention. We called this kind of connection and help "bridging". Discussion seemed to focus on how we could "bridge" this gap of lack in the community and do so in a business setting.
The next layer of the onion involved the groups of people who would fit the category of needed the "bridge" into the workplace training environment. These included: youth, currently unemployed, people with social disadvantage and people with skill disadvantage.
The next layer of discussion involved talking about the skills which a person experiencing disadvantage may need to practice in order to move forward toward being able to enter a training or skills education centre. These were areas such as creative arts, manual arts, food services, computer literacy, garden skills. The consensus seemed to be if we could provide a place in which people could learn these kinds of skills they would gain the self-confidence and awareness to move forward to train in already existing institutions.
So what does this look like? The next lay of discussion surrounded the actual business model. These included the following: An arts centre in which ceramics, screen printing and furniture making were developed; a cafe in which people were trained to be baristas in cafes around Canberra, a computer centre in which people were trained to use open source software and a garden centre where people were trained to grow their own food.
The next layer of discussion surrounded how to make these models into business ones; that is, to create the enterprise sector. Sales of art and t-shirts, a fully functioning cafe, a computer training centre, a garden market for selling produce to the public were discussed.
Another layer of discussion was around what is marketable in todays world. This brought us to discuss the desire for organic items, homemade quality, green and recycling and the need for focus on an ethnic mix.
Finally, we dreamed about how to pull this off. One of the participants referred to the open lot down the road which would allow for this to happen. The desire of the group was to pursue the availability of said parcel of land (previously used to train children to ride their bikes in traffic).
The feeling of the group at the end of the meeting was very positive and would love to re-convene next week, same time.
I assured the group that the entire discussion a dreaming that took place in those 90 minutes were along the lines of the dreams for which NationsHeart Connect was being formed. Further, that alothough we met on the basis of a government offer -- Jobs Fund -- that, our success in pulling off these dreams was not predicated on the Jobs Fund. The dream could and will go on whether or not we can apply or attain such funding at this moment.
Ronaldo
2 May 2009
You got it right... it was an exciting meeting... and now ther eis a lot of work to do
ReplyDeleteI love this, all of it....the discussion, the dreaming and the faith that these dreamscan go on regardless of government input.
ReplyDeleteI support this discussion and hope for the future for the community of Belconnen.