Ontario Launches New Social Enterprise Strategy
Ontario has launched a new five-year strategy that will help social enterprises grow their businesses, enter new markets and create jobs, while addressing complex social and environmental challenges.
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Ontario's Social Enterprise Strategy 2016-2021 sets out significant commitments in three key areas:
- Equipping social enterprises with solid business fundamentals
- Connecting social enterprises to markets and capital to grow and scale
- Demonstrating the value of social enterprise and social finance to investors, government, and communities
Ontario will invest more than $6 million in the first year of this renewed strategy. The province will leverage Ontario's existing entrepreneurship infrastructure, impact investment capital, and a growing market opportunity to support social enterprises. Some of the feature initiatives include:
- Integrating specialized social entrepreneurship supports, such as impact measurement, into mainstream entrepreneurship programs, such as those offered through the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs
- Developing a Social Enterprise Procurement Action Plan to increase the Ontario government's procurement from social enterprises
- Designing a new Social Venture Investment Fund to accelerate the flow of private investment capital to growing social enterprises
- Establishing an Impact Measurement Task Force to build consensus on uniform impact measurement standards for social enterprises
- Piloting one or more Social Impact Bonds to improve social outcomes
- Establishing a Centre of Excellence in Social Enterprise and Social Finance to help government leverage social enterprises and social finance as tools to achieve policy objectives
Full press release available here.