The pioneering Spark Competition – designed and managed by Eastside – is to again open for bids from applicant enterprises as Department for Communities and Local Government, BT and PricewaterhouseCoopers announce funding of £3.4m in total until 2011.
Housing Minister, Iain Wright, commented: “Social enterprises … are already giving people who have spent time on the streets another chance in the workplace, which is why we are continuing to support social enterprise and invest... in a second round of the Spark programme."
In 2008, Spark enabled 15 social enterprises to grow and provide long-term training and employment opportunities for homeless people.
Building on the success of its first year, Spark will make a call out to participants in December and invite applicants to submit business cases for either new or established social enterprises that are fighting homelessness.
If you are interested in making an application, check out the Spark website – www.sparkchallenge.org. Bids will open on December 10th.
Spark does offer money but it also provides business support and partnering opportunities to help social enterprises scale up. In fact, many of our first set of Spark winners commented that it was the additional support that added most value.
One example of this support in year one were the fifteen partnerships that were set up between winning organizations and our corporate partners. These proved an invaluable experience to both sides: people from very different walks of life bringing their skills to the table in the pursuit of creating social change.
We will be doing a similar thing in the new programme for 2009. We will not just be challenging the social entrepreneurs to submit great business proposals. Teams of employees from corporate partners will also be challenged to apply their skills and their firm’s resources to support the growth of Spark’s winning social enterprises. Corporate teams will be challenged to see how much value they can bring to the sector over the course of 2009!
Buoyed by this and our perception that companies are increasingly looking to move beyond social responsibility initiatives and invest in more meaningful ways, we will continue to knock on the doors of big business to advocate their support for social enterprise. Not because this is a good thing to do; but because it’s good business for them to do.
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