One of Eurodiaconia’s focus areas is to promote social enterprise initiatives among our members to organise their provision of social and health care services. In spite of the growing importance of social enterprise projects among Eurodiaconia members, many of them are faced with challenges in accessing funding sources which are able to finance such projects in an adequate manner. The impact of the crisis and austerity measures have resulted in tighter public budgets and, consequently, diminished public funding opportunities for social enterprises. In view of this, diaconal providers of social services have turned to private sources of funding as a way to circumvent these shortages. However, private funding clearly brings both opportunities and challenges to not-for-profit organisations.
Through this Handbook, Eurodiaconia wishes to improve the understanding among diaconal social enterprises of which types and instruments of private financing are available to them and to assess which among those could be most useful to fulfil the social mission of social enterprise projects. This need was identified at Eurodiaconia’s event on Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE), organised jointly with ENSIE and EASPD in Brussels, 18-19 May 2015.
You can access the Handbook here (EN).