Social Enterprise Development for Communities

      DLSU’s advocacy on Social Entrepreneurship through COSCA LSEED progresses with another learning  session  on “Social Innovations (SI)” facilitated on January 6, 2017.  The session, participated by the  “Social Enterprise (SE)”  student  fellows aimed  to introduce them to the concept of SI particularly its history, ecosystem, dimensions, as well as its relationship with other disciplines such as social entrepreneurship, social economy, social investments, and social change.  To  concretize  the  SI  concept, COSCA LSEED’s Development  Specialist cited  as  example a number  of SI initiatives  during  the  18^th  and  19^th centuries including Benjamin Franklin’s modifications on the social organization of communities which contributed to efforts on poverty alleviation.  Another SI initiative is Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’ which directly addresses the process of innovation and referring to entrepreneurs as “people who combine existing elements in new ways to create a product or service” thus, initiating and applying  SI  in their respective fields.  The group also discussed  the  various  SI frameworks, definitions  of  SE, and its relation to  social transformation and change.  

      The student fellows shared their session takeaways on SI, as follows:  1) social innovation is  multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder,  2)  SI can be viewed, both as a strategy and an end-in-view, and (3) SI as a never ending process or can be considered as a cycle. Jen, an LSEED student fellow mentioned “What’s important  is to remove  your focus from the  things that you consider best. You need to empathize with the needs of  others because  that is what  will  matter in your  final product.”

      Also, members of the LSEED community core group  were introduced to the  concept  of  ‘Design Thinking’  through  a  workshop  session on January  20, 2017 .  The  activity emphasized the end view of design thinking which is  to create and innovate solutions and  that problems we encounter  in  our communities have to be  considered as  opportunities  rather than barriers. The session oriented the participants  on the key phases of design thinking with the   simple “wallet  designing activity.”  First phase is  'Empathy' to help understand people within the context of the design challenge.  Secondly, the 'Defining Phase'  to help  facilitate the crafting of meaningful and actionable problem statement and thirdly,  the  'Ideate mode' where one focuses on idea generation and which encourages an open communication and collaboration among team members while  doing  the  “Prototyping”  and  “Testing.”

      Majority of the participants pointed out that organizing their thoughts enabled them to come up with better designs. They added that inputs from their counterparts became relevant on the way they designed the wallets especially in terms of functionality.   Rowena, a participant  shares, when asked of her important  take-away  from the workshop on “Design Thinking”, “Dapat hindi lamang ang  sarili mong  ideya ang  pwede mong  I  share,  bagkus mahalaga pa rin ang pinagsama-samang ideya upang mabigyan ng magandang solusyon ang problema at nang maunawaan ito ng bawat isa.” (It is  good  to share not  only your own  idea, the  collective idea, as well,  is  important in coming up with an appropriate solution to  the problem  and help each of the participants to  understand the  same).

• Core Group (DOCX)
• LSEED Specialist facilitates the session on SI (DOCX)
• LSEED Learners attend the session on "SI" (DOCX)

       DLSU’s  Center for Social Concern and Action  continue the  series  of   workshop both  for  community members  and  key  student  “Champions “  on  social entrepreneurship  as  avenue to support  social enterprises in partner urban poor communities and in building capacities of promising urban poor women and out-of-school youth on social entrepreneurship (SE) and enabling communities to develop SEs.

       Discussions with  community members were facilitated by COSCA’s Development Specialist for LSEED last  October 13 and 28, 2016 primarilly to provide the participants a briefer of the   micro small and medium  enterprises  (MSMEs) in the Philippines. During  the  workshop, community  members  were  grouped  into  clusters  ( Achievement Cluster to discuss topics  on Opportunity Seeking, Persistence, Commitment to Work, Risk Taking, Demand for Quality and Efficiency,  the Planning Cluster to tackle  Goal Setting, Information Seeking, Systematic Planning and Monitoring, and  the Power Cluster to discuss Persuasion and Self-Confidence) to  better appreciate  the Personal Entrepreneurial Characteristics of  Social Entrepreneurs (SEs).

       Following were the highlights of  the workshop:  One team understood the instructions clearly, and was able to come up with the right strategies.  The aggressiveness of  the team enabled them to produce the most number of products and earn the highest number of sales. The team highlighted the importance of  maximizing  bank accessibility to secure their money as well as the value of producing quality products / services.   Another team  displayed inability to take the risk of buying raw materials to produce products, which  resulted to the very low production output and sales outcome.  The  third  group  showed one important  strength,   the quality of the product they  produced enabled them to sell at a very competitive price. The team however acknowledged that the team  was not able to get the instructions correctly  hence, they spent their ‘money’ on unnecessary things during the  start of the simulation activity.  One group failed to come up with the  strategies correctly, experienced difficulty  during their planning activity and  was unable to take and manage the risks as entrepreneurs.

       The workshop  conducted  on October 28, 2016  introduced  the  women community members (a number  of LSEED student fellows attended as participant-observers)  basically to  two concepts:  1) Social Entrepreneurship  in the  Philippines  and  Characteristics  of  SEs, and 2)  Responding  to  Relevant  Community Problem/s and  creating the  SE idea,  establishing  partners  and  developing  the   SE idea. 

        The  learning sessions which  include  the series of workshop  conducted  on October 13 and 28 inspired  a  number  of  student fellows to  share  the  advocacy of  advancing SE.