Connect Migrants to the Business Community

Description

CHALLENGE

Project Ahead contributed to set up Dialogue, a social business incubator located at the heart of the city of Naples. The incubator offers support services, mentoring, and training activities to foster the creation of multi-cultural social businesses to aspiring local and migrant entrepreneurs. However, the latter face far more obstacles than the former to connect to the business community. Such disconnection hampers the success of their enterprises. They meet hindrances in:

1. Demonstrating their educational and professional experience, providing evidences of their educational and work experience can prove hard. Failing to demonstrate them can jeopardize their access to finance, or to buy properties to settle their businesses etc. 
2. Communicating in the host country language. Migrants tend to use their mother tongue in family and with friends. They speak Italian mainly at work. Thus, they have few occasions of improving their language skills, which are key for their entrepreneurial success.
3. Reaching central urban area. Migrant communities tend to live in suburb areas where housing is more affordable than in cities. Such areas are poorly connected to the city through public transport network. However, developing a business at the heart of the social and business community is crucial to the business success.
4. Relying on a supporting network. Far from their families, migrants cannot rely on a network that supports them in starting up their own company, by helping dealing with the daily life, taking care of households or just cheering them up.

We are looking for new solutions as those implemented so far are not sufficient, since they do not respond to the needs of our participants as a whole –they provide a one-to-one answer with no extensive reach – and also as we are losing potential new participants - i.e. since they can’t reach us if they do not have a private car.

We are looking for new tools through which the targeted beneficiaries can learn languages, providing a wide range of services; solutions for mobility from suburbs to the city center; simple and friendly solutions to prove the educational and work experience of migrants ; tools to create new and nurture established relationship. We are looking for ambitious solutions than can be simple to implement

CONTEXT

Naples is the main city in Southern Italy, third in Italy. The migrant population of the Campania region, whose Naples is capital, mostly lives in the city, peaking 70.000 units. However, a considerable number of them are scattered through the surrounding area and the suburbs (more than 50.000) (De Filippo and Strozza, 2014). They are mainly from Ukraine (22%), Romania (18%), Morocco (9%) (De Filippo and Strozza, 2014). They are the main target group of the Dialogue incubator activities.

Dialogue is a social business incubator settled in a central area of Naples. It is run by Project Ahead and several partners and provides training, mentoring, and business support services to local and migrant aspirant entrepreneurs. Activities started on March 2017 and has involved about 30 migrants so far. The goal pursued by Project Ahead and its partners is to foster the creation of multi-cultural social businesses made up by locals and migrants, thus leveraging social entrepreneurship as a mean of social inclusiveness and integration.

The challenge reflects obstacles faced by aspiring migrant entrepreneurs undertaking the Dialogue incubation programme

THE CHALLENGE OWNER

Project Ahead is a cooperative company which contribute to local development through social entrepreneurship. From more than 15 years, we empower people from disadvantaged group – people that are young, unemployed, migrant or with disabilities – through social entrepreneurship and innovation. Marco Traversi, Project Ahead CEO, has an extensive experience in social innovation addressing disadvantaged people needs. He founded the Italian Innovation Network and has been part the work group of the Labour and Social Affair Ministry as social business expert.

Project Ahead firmly believes that social and cultural diversity can be a competitive edge for local economic development. It set up Dialogue, a social business incubator for young locals and migrants that provides workshop, training programmes, and a tailored range of consulting services on start-ups. However, objectives, efforts and services cannot be fully successful if our participants are hampered in connecting to Dialogue and to the social and business community.

We tried to tackle these issues by reinforcing partnerships with others organisations to provide services to our participants but they were mostly answers on an individual basis. We are looking for structural solutions to empower migrants in their daily life addressing the challenges we raised. Solutions can solve a specific issue or tackle them as a whole.

.

COMMITMENT

We have been addressing specific requests from our participants individually, then realizing that most of them were facing similar issues. Networks and tailored solutions have been leveraged once specific issue arose. Thus, we need ideas and proposals from SPs in order to adopt an efficient and effective solution and to be able to answer to aspiring migrant entrepreneur needs as a whole.

We can provide SP with:

• Information, data and expertise on the issue.
• Consultancy / coaching thanks to our 17 years’ experience on the social innovation and business ideas field.
• Connections to potential partners/investors from Naples, Italy and abroad;
• Endorsement and promotion thanks to our network of partners in social entrepreneurship field.

Beyond the Social Challenges Innovation Platform, we support SPs through involving him/her in our incubation activities (workshops, seminars, events, taylored advices and consultancy services). By entering our incubation programme, SPs will be supported in developing better their ideas. They will be followed up also by our partner in Milan and in Rome. They also will have access to local, national and international networks (see here: http://en.dialogueplace.eu/who-we-are). They will have the opportunity to participate to our social startup contest (https://socialchangeweekend.com) and get the opportunity to enjoy a period of incubation in Europe thanks to our partner Impact Network (http://www.impactnetwork.co).