A number of previous development projects have benefitted from action learning, such as our Starting Out pilot and our 2020 Social Invest network.
Pilot projects
Starting Out is a series of six intensive learning sessions tailored to emerging groups seeking to establish themselves as community organisations or social enterprises. After the first group of participants had completed the course in 2020, they formed an action learning set to continue developing the practical skills they’d acquired and to support each other over the hurdles involved in getting a new initiative off the ground.
The 2020 Social Invest South West initiative was a two-year project working with local organisations to develop their social enterprise trading activities and, where appropriate, seek social investment to grow. Two subsets of the wider network formed learning sets around business planning and investment development.
Future plans
The Starting Out course of workshops will run again later in 2021 or early 2022. For the groups that complete the series, we plan to offer another follow-on learning set to support their initial establishment and early growth. We’ll publish details of the Starting Out course and action learning in the autumn.