[] – To kick things off, could you please share a little bit about your background and what led to your passion in social enterprise?

My dad was an inventor and an entrepreneur, and I guess it’s in my blood, but to be able to put that social slant on it is something that I’ve really enjoyed.

I’ve really been interested in, and I’ve been taking part in national conversations about what the future could look like for the sector in Ireland. I suppose that’s what’s led me to where we are now.

Wonderful. You’re the Interim CEO at the Social Enterprise Republic of Ireland. I’m really keen to hear about one of the world’s most newly formed networks and the sort of work that you’re doing there, its purpose, and why it was set up?

We’re [really] only babies. We were launched on the 10th of July, to be that representative body for social enterprise in Ireland. It was born from a call within the sector for a united voice. I was approached a number of months ago by a group of practitioners and supporters of social enterprise, who I really respect. People who have been instrumental in building the sector and I just admire so much of what they’ve done. When I was asked to become involved, I really felt that it was first of all an amazing opportunity for me, but also to be a practitioner and to be able to represent the voice of my colleagues in the sector.

I thought it was a really nice opportunity. our intention is for the organisation to be really involved in the growth of social enterprises, and for our members to be represented in the conversations about what our collective needs are.

At the moment, we’re consulting with them and creating channels to capture that feedback and inform our work going forward. Inclusiveness is one of our key values and making sure that social enterprise is such a broad sector in Ireland as well.

We’ve got large organisations, both urban and rural, and just getting to know them all is going to be our immediate challenge. There seems to be a general consensus so far in our conversations that a big priority is going to be to raise awareness of social enterprise and the impact that we create, but also to collect data, which will help us to share that story.

As both the leader of The Shona Project and now very much a voice for the sector and many of your colleagues, what sort of observations do you have in general of the social enterprise sector in Ireland?

Well in both roles as a practitioner and in this new role as Interim CEO of SERI, I’m so excited about social enterprise in Ireland. I think it’s really a start of a new era for a sector. We have such a rich history in social enterprises, but we just haven’t been recognised. Previously, I’m not sure if you’re aware of the GGA, which is our Gaelic Games Association, [but it’s] a huge part of our culture. It was founded in 1884 and it’s only now being recognised as a social enterprise. I think we have more credit unions per capita, we’re amongst the highest in the world, if not the highest.

Now we see the emergence of social enterprises who are of all shapes and sizes, which are creating all sorts of different impact.

There’s lots of diversity, and just in October last year, the Department of Rural and Community Affairs, which is where a social enterprise sits, launched Ireland’s first ever social enterprise policy, which we’ve never had before. Even for that level of recognition, the policy just means that as SERI is now being launched, we really look forward to working with government and with the other stakeholders to build on the brilliant work that’s being done and to make sure that we help to and we contribute to the delivery of that policy.

What a better time than now, where a large part of the world or globe in general is really seeing some huge changes as a result of COVID-19. What sort of changes have you seen in the way that social enterprises operate and in their response to this pandemic?

It’s obviously been very difficult, and we’ve had to adapt very quickly to find new ways to reach our beneficiaries, many of whom I would say would need us now more than ever before. In terms of revenue, I don’t think there’s many social enterprises I’ve come across that haven’t been directly impacted, and to just use The Shona Project as an example, the majority of our earned revenue came from the work that we did in schools, and we would have had a number of big conferences every year.

But they’ve all obviously been cancelled for the entire year with no idea of if and when it may come back to some sort of ‘business as usual’.

But, what has happened is that so many of us have been forced to take those ideas that we might have scribbled in a notebook somewhere and meant to get around to developing or meant to get around to seeing if there was other ways that we could add to that business as usual.

I’ve seen social enterprises that have been very innovative and were very resilient, and we’ve seen some amazing solutions emerge, some great partnerships, some new brilliant innovations. While it’s really been a challenging time and quite stressful for a lot of us who run a social enterprise or are involved in the sector, I can see a lot of positives as well have come out of it.

A lot of promise for the future if we just get through this next few months or year or so.