UTS (University of Technology Sydney) Centre for Business and Social Innovation researchers and Wayside Chapel have run a workshop for CCA member organisations on “re-calibrating the ‘social enterprise’ equation”.
The workshop considered how hybrid enterprise strategies can open up new opportunities for not-for-profit community education providers. The day was led by UTS Business School Senior Lecturer Melissa Edwards, Senior Lecturer, assisted by Danielle Logue, Associate Professor; Gillian McAllister, Senior Researcher; and Lee Cooper, Head of Innovation, Strategy & Social Impact at Wayside Chapel.
The workshop was designed to familiarise CCA members with the hybrid organisation concept and provide an opportunity to learn about the practitioner’s perspective told through a Wayside Chapel case study of developing a hybrid enterprise, the Heart Cafe at Bondi Beach. CCA organised the workshop as one in a series of events to assist its members to develop diverse and sustainable business models that support their missions.
Mellissa Edwards with Caspar Zika, New Futures Training, Ka Chan, JobQuest and Dave Hammond, Jesuit Social Services
The workshop placed community-based enterprises into context through a panel discussion of CCA members that run social enterprises:
- JobQuest’s property maintenance and cleaning enterprise – Ka Chan, Manager;
- New Futures Training’s Second Stitch textile refugee/asylum seeker textile enterprise in North Melbourne – Caspar Zika, Creative Director; and
- Jesuit Social Services’ Western Sydney enterprises – Dave Hammond, NSW Manager.
The workshop addressed questions such as: “Can an enterprise help sustain mission impact?” and “Are the beneficiaries of an enterprise also its customers?” The group discussed measurement and value; one speaker said, “Everything that’s measurable is not valuable, and everything that’s valuable is not measurable.”
Workshop Background
Hybrid organisations are not defined by their for-profit or non-profit status, rather how they create and deliver different forms of value as a core part of managing their organisational mission and strategy.
From left to right: Danielle Logue, Associate Professor; Melissa Edwards, Senior Lecturer; Gillian McAllister, Senior Researcher (UTS Business School) and Lee Cooper, Head of Innovation, Strategy & Social Impact (Wayside Chapel)
Using a hybrid organisational framework can facilitate discussions about how an organisation can best create viable revenue streams to support its mission. Hybrids focus on both social and economic benefits, so it’s not a matter of one or the other. It shifts the focus away from a resilience strategy, where you are reacting to continual shifts in government funding arrangements, toward a proactive sustainability strategy. This simple shift means an organisation can start to consider how to best generate the resources and revenue streams it needs to create a thriving social program. Any change is not without implications on how organisations manage to achieve their social mission, how to communicate this to stakeholders and daily organisational operations.
The workshop took place in Sydney on 6 June 2019. Read more detail about the workshop here.
