Mr. Seán Coughlan:

I thank the Seanad for giving us the opportunity to address it today. We have heard many powerful stories of individual entrepreneurs and seen examples. We have heard about the context in which social entrepreneurship occurs within Ireland and internationally. We have heard about Ashoka, the originator of the social entrepreneurship movement, and One Foundation which has been the stimulus for bringing it to Ireland. We are Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and our job is to support social entrepreneurs. Having everyone as a social entrepreneur would be a disaster and we do not want that. There are lots of skills, talents and contributions to society and the country. Just as we do not want every single person to be a business entrepreneur, though a significant incidence is necessary, we do not want everyone to work within a larger corporate environment or be in the arts. We want people in all of these sectors. That is critical. While we do not want everyone to be a social entrepreneur, we want and need some to do it. One of the themes to emerge in the last couple of hours of discussion has been that social entrepreneurs play a critical role in developing society and moving it forward.

Ms Deirdre Mortell and Mr. Paul O'Hara referred to social entrepreneurs as the inspiration for change-making among people in general. Social Entrepreneurs Ireland started in 2004. We have talked about the great initiative, Change Nation, which was run by Ashoka and saw 50 solutions from abroad. I am not a very complicated person and think of Change Nation as the IDA of social entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and Ashoka - through its Irish fellows - are more akin to Enterprise Ireland. The indigenous talent is really strong. We have fantastic individuals with powerful ideas who are changing Ireland daily. To realise that potential and be able to find solutions to the entrenched environmental and social challenges we face, we must be able to support these individuals and develop their ideas. That is where Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and Ashoka come in. We fund early stage projects.

We have spoken a great deal about the necessity for both growth capital and early stage investment. Our view is that money in and of itself is not the solution. While it is an important part of the solution, if we write a cheque and walk away, the money will not be used very effectively. We can see the analogies in the commercial sector. Where private or State agencies invest in early stage commercial entrepreneurs, they do not simply write a cheque and disappear for a year before coming back to ask, "What are you doing?" A set of training and mentoring activities is built up around these entrepreneurs to ensure they are effective and help to grow their organisations. That is the job of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland which runs an awards programme. On Monday of this week we closed our call for applications for this year. We have €500,000 in direct funding that we are going to disburse this year to eight social entrepreneurs and their projects. At the top level, we will invest €130,000 in three early stage projects. Typically, we are the first funder into these organisations. We will invest €22,000 in five of the projects. On top of that financial investment, we build an intense programme of training and support to help social entrepreneurs move their projects forward. We discussed social entrepreneurs working on alcohol issues and one of the people referred to was Ms Frances Black. We were the first funder of her RISE foundation. With our support, RISE has extended its reach to people nationally. Frances Black is not in attendance because she is on a fund-raising trip to the United States of America which we financed to have the necessary growth capital which her organisation is struggling to find to continue to grow and expand.

We know that this stuff works. We see internationally from the statistics of the Ashoka network that there are 3,000 social entrepreneurs. It is a fantastic resource to be able to look at to see what works and what does not. We can also see it in Ireland. In the past seven years we have invested in 161 social entrepreneurs. We have raised and written cheques for more than €4.9 million for their projects and have not received or sought any State funding. It is all money that has been raised privately. Every year we examine the impact our social entrepreneurs have. Another question that arose was how this stuff was measured. Those 161 social entrepreneurs have had a direct impact on more than 200,000 lives in Ireland. They do not just change lives, they contribute to the real economy. There is a win on all fronts. They have created over 800 employment opportunities in full-time, part-time and contract work within their organisations. We see fantastic leverage also. People want to invest in success. Having Ashoka or Social Entrepreneurs Ireland behind someone gives him or her credibility. In the past 12 months every social entrepreneur in whom we have invested has been able to raise for every euro from us an average of €10.83 for his or her project. While he or she would raise some of that money anyway, the programme of support we provide is critical to upskill and build capacity which makes him or her much more effective at his or her job. Making him or her more effective is not the end goal but the impact he or she will have on real people's lives. The Seanad committee will hear from one other social entrepreneur when I finish. The impact is real and tangible.

We are very interested in supporting individual projects. Our success is entirely based on the success of our social entrepreneurs. We only exist to help to make their projects happen. While we need to get behind individual projects, we must also create an environment that will allow the sector to grow and thrive and realise its potential. That is critical. Money is an important element of creating that environment, but it is not the only one. We have talked about mergers and acquisitions and replication and duplication in the sector. It is encouraging that a large group of organisations operating in the social enterprise space have coalesced to form a task force - the social enterprise and entrepreneurship task force. We do not want to compete with each other for attention or have a purely narrow self-interested organisational focus in our conversations. We want to build a sector that will include more people like Mr. James Whelton, Ms Caroline Casey and Ms Frances Black. We want to see the sector grow and thrive. There is great potential and we are not only looking for the Government to support us.

We want to see that sector growing. There is huge potential because not only are we looking to Government to support us but to the corporate sector. As Deirdre said there has been a major withdrawal of philanthropic funding following the exit of the One Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies. The corporate sector will not replace that money but the amount it gives in Ireland is way below average for a developed country. Corporates by and large want to contribute but they need to find how to do that in a way that makes sense for them. One of the interesting things about social entrepreneurship is that it speaks their language. We are talking about entrepreneurs and they understand that. Social entrepreneurship can provide a very interesting bridge between the social and not-for-profit sectors and supporters of Ashoka and our organisation are beginning to build that.

Many exciting things are happening but in order to realise all of this potential we need money and other things. The social enterprise and entrepreneurship task force came up with a set of specific recommendations. These are real, tangible issues that the Legislature could move forward. I will outline a couple which are specific, realisable and do not require budget allocations. The first is that we need the Government to focus specifically on this sector. We want there to be a Minister of State with responsibility for social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. This is not a matter of finding money but of developing policies to create the environment that allows the social entrepreneurs to grow and thrive. Our view is that the most logical place for that to happen is within the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation because that is its role. There is a conversation in government about where that should sit. Should it sit with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government or in one of the big spending Departments? This concerns entrepreneurship and enterprise and the journey that social entrepreneurs go on is the same whether they are commercial or social. The expertise and all the resources are in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. We would really like to see some momentum and support to move that agenda forward.

The second recommendation is that we would like to see social entrepreneurs and enterprises getting access to State supports. We do not understand why our people cannot get access to the non-financial support provided by the county and city enterprise boards and the Enterprise Ireland mentoring schemes. Our work contributes to the real economy, creates better communities and helps vulnerable people. Why does the State not make those existing resources available to social entrepreneurs?

The third recommendation stems from the fact that regulations preclude credit unions from lending to social enterprises and entrepreneurs. That legislation should be changed because the credit unions could provide the capital and funding which is such a critical element of our work. We would also like to see community or social benefit clauses added to the State tendering process. That does not cost any money but it would use that tendering process to contribute to communities.

The last point is that we would like to see an educational environment that supports and encourages this work. There have been some encouraging developments along these lines. Social Entrepreneurs Ireland funded Educate Together to develop a teaching module on social entrepreneurship for every class from junior infants up to sixth class. Our criteria were that it had to be made freely available to every primary school teacher in the country, not just to Educate Together. Those modules exist. All we need is for the Department of Education and Skills to promote them. They are not being used enough because teachers do not know enough about them. DCU has taken a leadership role at third level by launching the first masters programme in social enterprise. It is running at the Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship which is affiliated with DCU and 40 people will soon be the first masters graduates in social enterprise in this country.

The potential is enormous. There are organisations and individual social entrepreneurs that change lives daily. Support organisations like ours and Ashoka create the environment for these people but we cannot take this journey alone. Without support we will leave potential on the table which will leave vulnerable people without the supports and solutions to problems that they might otherwise get. We need money but we also need an enabling environment. This House has a tremendous opportunity to help us and together we can move the agenda forward and get the Government to take on board some of the non-financial measures, thereby creating the potential for much greater change.