Nick Priggis continues his series on Social Enterprise
One of the joys of being part of an emerging and growing Social Enterprise is seeing how the Lord has made the connections connect. One of the identified challenges in the particular area where we live is the lack of aspiration and ambition around work and employment. Generational underemployment and a lack of academic success leave many people with a sense of despair and hopelessness. Our solution and the connectiions the Lord brought about was to address this through our Hope Initiatives vocational training programme.
Connection 1: What latent gifts and untapped talents are in the church?
The starting point wasn’t, for us, found in identifying the problems in our community. Rather, the Lord identified the resources in our local community church, a number of men in our church who were either retired engineers or interested in car mechanics. They were waiting for something to happen to energise and mobilise them into action.
As leaders in the church we facilitated conversations around their interests and passions, and they came up with the plan of an evening outreach using car mechanics to reach young people. This became our learning environment and foundation for the growth of our embryonic Social Enterprise, Hope Initiatives. In God’s economy the gifts latent in the church were amongst those needed to start to address those issues we’d identified.
Note: We started with the gifts the Lord had put in His church.
Connection 2: What investment opportunities are there?
As your Social Enterprise grows so do its requirements for financial investment. Whether it’s for staffing, premises or capital items, a growing Social Enterprise needs investment. Making connections with funders, donors and investors is crucial for it first to be established and then to thrive.
Warning: Emerging organisations often change tack in order to take advantage of the funding. This is dangerous because if you change tack too often you lose your sense of direction. You end up travelling in a direction you never envisaged. To ensure you connect with the right investment opportunities a Social Enterprise needs to look at whether potential investors’ values are your values, and whether your vision and calling are compatible with theirs. Where there is no congruency the Social Enterprise would be very wise and prudent to wait for the Lord to reveal the better investor connection.
Early on, we found a couple of small investor grant-giving organisations who were willing to share our journey. Between them they provided funding for premises, some staffing and capital items. They helped us get going.
Next time we will look at the influence of connections with churches.