How much did it cost?
The project cost approximately £300,000 per year to run. Over the four years the total expenditure was just over £1.2m as shown in table 2 below.
Table 2 Grant and earned income to Enterprising Communities
| Income source | Amount |
|---|---|
| Public sector funding | |
Phoenix Development Fund |
529,642 |
Objective 2/ ERDP |
232,225 |
Cumbria Rural Development Programme |
210,476 |
Countryside Agency |
18,000 |
| Private sector funding | |
Barclays bank |
119,000 |
| Earned income | |
Business Link |
49,990 |
Other contracts |
48,000 |
Total |
1,207,333 |
What was delivered for this money?
Like all economic projects EC had to attribute and record the number of new jobs created and sustained through its support. EC estimated that the work of the team contributed to the creation of 60.5 new jobs and sustained 87 jobs in rural Cumbria. Thus EC could obtain a crude estimate of how much they cost by undertaking a straight line division. But this would not yield the true costs. All the new jobs and most of the sustained jobs were also dependent on receiving grant monies to fund salaries and other core costs and then the hundreds of volunteer hours to write donor proposal, get the social enterprise up and running etc would have to be factored in.
EC believe that the project contributed to quality of life, sustainability, social and economic inclusion, protection and enhancement of the environment, and community development... whatever name given to the social success criteria for social enterprises. EC have attempted to measure this type of social return, but were seriously hampered by the underdevelopment of social accounting and expense and time involved.
Can the model be replicated?
Right from the start it was clear that it would be difficult to sustain a 100% grant funded, well resourced rural social enterprise infrastructure support model, run out of a charity with high operating costs because it covered a large remote rural area. Thus the organisational model per se was not replicable (i.e. too expensive to survive). What was replicable however, were the models, tools and approaches the project used to deliver high quality social enterprise support. Likewise, three team members have set-up cooperative consortium based on a social enterprise consultancy business model – this should be more replicable. Click here to find out more about the cooperative consortium