Esterni - Bringing people to public spaces

As part of our search for ways of doing social entrepreneurship, last week we had a meeting at Cascina Cuccagna where Beniamino Saibene, founder associate of esterni received us to tell us about their project and its development.

esterni is a non-profit, cultural association born in Milan in 1995. It was the idea of Beniamino Saibene and Lorenzo Castellini which at the time felt they needed to give something back to the city in which they lived in. For this they thought about using the public space as a place for people to meet. Their main idea was to bring people out of their houses and use the street as a place to relate and make new connections. They, mostly, work on the idea of "public design", which is rethinking and redesigning public spaces and creating events where social aggregation is the key.

After sixteen years of work in Milan and Italy first, and in other countries after, esterni has a really positive case history in the field of self-sustainable socially oriented businesses. Now a days with approximately 30 workers within the organization and various freelances collaborating, esterni organizes a series of events.

Within the events they organize we can find:

- Milano Film Festival: This is one of the most important film festivals in Italy. It's a platform in which independent and young film makers can showcase their work. More info on: http://www.milanofilmfestival.it/

- Public Design Festival: As part of the events for Salone del Mobile, with this initiative they pretend to design and think for public spaces. They think about the public spaces at all levels, redesigning them to create new spaces and interventions within the city of Milan. More info on: http://www.publicdesignfestival.org/

- Cascina Cuccagna: With the idea of giving spaces back to the city, this 15th century abandoned urban farm is being refurbished and it will serve as a space in which various cultural events will be taking place. More info on: http://www.cuccagna.org/

Other initiatives worth mentioning are Audiovisiva, an event for contemporary music and video art. And the brand new Animation Film Festival still in it's first edition but aiming to grow at a good pace in the coming years.

As part of our learning experience, this meeting helped us to understand new ways of developing social enterprises, ways to find funding for them, and a series of initiatives that can be developed within the social entrepreneurship arena.

For more information on esterni visit http://www.esterni.org/

Thank you Beniamino!

Analyzing a Businass Plan - RUMA

On our lecture on business planning we had an assignment of analyzing a business plan, and for this post I'm going to analyze the Indonesian based Social Business RUMA.

Having won the first prize of the Harvard Social Enterprise “Pitch for Change” competition, the acronym that gives name to this social business literally to Your Micro Business Partner. Through their business model they pretend to empower poor women by supplying them with a kit that enables them to start their own micro franchises hence becoming micro-entrepreneurs.

Using the strucutre seen during the lecture I'll try to make the analysis:

What?

Most of the time when poor people ask for a loan, they fall into a vicious cycle of debt. This is often caused by the way the money is spent after the loan is granted. No money is generated back so, in order to repay another loan has to be made. The RUMA business addresses this problem through the lending of Microfranchises, in their own words, they lend businesses to generate money.

Literally called a Business in a Box this micro-franchises provide all the tools and training required for selling electronic airtime minutes through mobile phones.

Who?

Knowing that the mobile phone industry has a high penentration on Indonesia, RUMA partnered with the Grameen Foundation as well as with Qualcomm to put this business into work. The Grameen Foundation provided the initial investment funds through its Pioneer Fund, as well as technical assistance that helped RUMA to build its initial operational framework (which includes technology systems and human capital). Qualcomm supplied the technological expertise on mobile phones through its Wireless Reach initiative.

How?

In order for RUMA to be a successful business they stipulated that the revenues will come from selling franchise kits that will be leased to the borrower by the financial institution, as well as for a margin obtained for each airtime sale. In that sense, the borrower of the microfranchise will use the revenue obtained to repay their loans. The estimated profit for the borrower is approximately $1/day. This business defines the poor as people as those living with less $2,5 a day (World Bank poverty line), so a steady $1/day supposes a 50% overall increase.

For measuring their results, RUMA chose the Grameen Foundation's Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) since t's country specific and it's based on a ten-question survey of readily identifiable indicators.

As for their fanantial sustainability, RUMA plans to break even within its first 2.5 years. In order to reach that goal they need to empower 5,000 of the poor and poorest by August 2011, having as a target to reach a 70% of people below the poverty line.

RUMA in numbers (current situation).

At this point, Ruma has:

• Created more than 600 new micro-business.
• 100% profitability for the micro-business owners.
• 97% of owners are women.
• 68% of business owners are below the poverty line ($2,5/day)

They also pretend to develop and deploy new business kits that deal with medical products and services, education and training, trade and distribution, and agriculture and fisheries.

For more information I leave a link were you can download a through presentation

Ruma Business Model Presentation

Working Wikily - Social Change with a Network Mindset

While browsing the web trying to find some business plans to analyze for the class, I stumbled upon this blog. Working Wikily.

The blog was created by the Monitor Insitute, which is an entity that aims (as they would say in their own words) "to help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems". They do this by giving consultancy, serving as a think tank of new trends, and being an incubator of new approaches and ideas.

The Working Wikily blog has the purpose "of providing practitioners in the social sector with a filter for the events that are pushing the field towards a more networked form of work and a perspective on how and why those events are unfolding".

In our case, this becomes relevant since we are doing a Master in Design For Social Business. We work inside the social sector, and the first part of this module was about setting a collaborative environment in order to approach any project in general (in this case our own experience of learning what is social business).

Networking is working in collaboration with others, building channels in which relationships are established and new ideas and ways of working are bred. This blog contains a lot of relevant articles, resources, and links that we may find useful in this new adventure we are taking part of...

For starters I leave you with a link where you can download their paper Working Wikily 2.0 in which they create the whole frame set for this approach to social innovation.

Enjoy!

Business planning for social entrepreneurs: the prequel

Yesterday's session brought about a surprise: students have proposed to participate in several competition for new social startups across the globe, as a way of exercise. Excellent: this is going to be a great exercise, and probably a lot of fun. It does, however, mean that we are going to move to next week one of the final lectures, the one about business planning (submissions in these competitions are business plans, what else could they be?), that was originally scheduled for much later. And that means I have to scramble to prepare the lecture.

I'll do my best, though my schedule is very full. I know the topic reasonably well, so the main problem will be preparing a batch of my famously sleek slides :-). To do a better job of it, there is something I need to know from each of you. Do you know what the following expressions mean:

• fixed costs vs. variable costs
• investments and depreciation of investments
• costs/revenues vs. liabilities/assets

Please each of you answer by commenting this post. Thanks!