Project title – ““Social Entrepreneurship as a community development mechanism”
Organisation title – “Association of Social Enterprises of Armenia”
Project duration – 6 months
Project total budget – 5.500.000 AMD, funding provided by the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project – 4.950.000, applicant’s financial contribution – 550.000 AMD.
Implementation place – RA
The main purpose of the project is to support “The development of social entrepreneurship in the regions of RA through a conceptual approach to the problem”.
The special goals of the project are:
To support the forming of the cooperation model between the local government and the SEs and the creation of a mechanism for the local governments to provide grants for SEs that solve community issues.
The activities of the project are:
Implementing a forum of Social Enterprises to demonstrate the successful examples of community development through social entrepreneurship.
With the cooperation of the ‘Economic Development and Investment’ and ‘Territorial Administration and Development’ Ministries develop mechanisms and choose one urban and one rural community as target communities of the project through a competition.
Development of mechanisms for providing grants for social enterprises in target communities from community budgets.
Creating and using an online tool in the format of ddp.am (Direct Democracy Platform) to find community issues, define their priority, generate ideas of SEs for solving them, discuss those ideas with other citizens and demonstrate them to the local government. Also, to later monitor and evaluate them.
The results of the program
- There has been implemented a forum for social enterprises with the participation of over a 150 people for the purpose of demonstrating the successful examples of community development through SE.
- A cooperation between the target Ministries (‘Economic Development and Investment’ and ‘Territorial Administration’) and ASEA has been formed.
- Before the half of the second month of the project the target communities have been chosen through a competition.
- A study of community budgets has been implemented and change proposals have been developed including the line of the grants for social enterprises.
- The changes of the budgets have been confirmed by the local government.
- The local government has developed a competitive package and procedure for the grants,
- An online tool in the format of am(Direct Democracy Platform) has been developed for defining the community issues in target communities and providing the SE ideas for solving them.
