Social Enterprise Design Challenge Launches

Philanthropy and crowdfunding have joined together to provide a new funding opportunity for Australian Not for Profit social enterprises.

The English Family Foundation has teamed up with crowdfunding platform StartSomeGood to develop a matched funding program to support Not for Profit social enterprises to test and design new concepts for creating social change.

The organisations said the initiative was aimed at “targeting ambitious leaders who are finding new and innovative solutions to tackle the most pressing issues within our communities, and who need a little help to achieve this”.

As part of the Social Enterprise Design Challenge, four organisations will be supported to run a crowdfunding campaign with the foundation providing the first 50 per cent of each of the four finalists’ funding goal, up to a total of $15,000 per organisation, which needs to be matched by the community.

“We are passionate about assisting emerging social enterprises to put their ideas into action and realise their vision for creating change in our world,” founder of the English Family Foundation and Queensland entrepreneur, Allan English, said.

“We are hoping that this matched crowdfunding campaign will allow organisations to gain the funding to try something a bit different and to gain the support of their community to achieve this.

“The motivation to try a new approach came out of research by the English Family Foundation which has shown that this early stage can often be make or break for those ideas which could potentially revolutionise society. Support at this initial stage is therefore crucial to future success.

“The English Family Foundation believes strongly in the power of community based engagement and that by linking giving to funds contributed by the community through crowdfunding we can ensure that their support goes to projects with a strong grounding in and enthusiasm from that community.”

StartSomeGood CEO Tom Dawkins said: “One of our passions at StartSomeGood is better connecting the social enterprise funding ecosystem by bringing together two forms of funding otherwise seen as very far apart – from institutions and from the crowd”.

He told Pro Bono Australia News it was “a rare opportunity for social enterprises specifically to propose innovative untested approaches to creating community impact, and a bold step for a foundation like the Allan English Foundation to work with a crowdfunding platform in this way”.  

“It is an honour to work with [a] foundation that is looking for new ways of creating a bigger impact. We believe this challenge does that and we look forward to helping to launch exceptional crowdfunding campaigns to support four innovative new social enterprises.”

The opportunity is open to Australian organisations with deductible gift recipient status running or launching a social enterprise.