The Guid Life was a ‘Social Innovation‘ project in Lanark, Scotland, renowned for its William Wallace history but more importantly for its history of pioneering Social Enterprise.

In New Lanark David Dale and Robert Owen pioneered new approaches to employment that paved the way for modern Social Enterprise.

MicroVenturing

The objective of the Guid Life was to build on this history and help bridge local divides between old and young, and also critically to help address the growing ‘Economic Divide‘, through empowering an ecosystem of social enterprise organizations.

The project won the AOL Innovation in the Community award for its work in using open source communities to connect social groups like the elderly with youth groups, playing a catalyst role in Bridging the Economic Divide through providing a “MicroVenturing portal”.

In the same way MicroFinance plays a key role in supporting social entrepreneurs, ‘MicroVenturing’ similarly lowers the barriers to entry. Through a web portal site that offered ‘micro-sites’, simple tools that enabled non-technical social entrepreneurs to publish their own web site and publish it into the directory within the site, the program enabled more social entrepreneurs to better incubate and promote their social organizations.

Sustainable social enterprise

The primary policy goal of the project was to enable sustainable social enterprise: enabling social entrepreneurs to become self-sustaining and reduce their reliance on grants.

The project was led by Tami McEvoy, an expert in “Social Business” – The hybrid combination of non-profit and commercial organizations.

In 2005 the UK government won their 2012 Olympics bid, resuting in severe cuts to funding for non-profits. This created an urgent requirement for these organizations to become sustainable, able to generate their own income without government funding.

In response Tami was recruited to develop ‘Sustainable Social Enterprise’ business strategies, pioneering a portal site that utilized Web 2.0 features to enable community collaboration between the 350,000 local residents, including young and old so that it also helped bridge the generational as well as the digital divides.

The micro-site feature enabled this fledgling organizations to present a web site like other professional organizations, helping them attract volunteers and other supporters.

Social organizations originate in response to a social need ‘at the coal face’ and therefore typically start very small, often with only one staff member and perhaps two or three helpful volunteers. Therefore becoming commercially proficient is often too significant a challenge to overcome, and so by aggregating their needs the Guid Life was able to develop centralized, shared services for them to take advantage of to meet this need.