[Indio Myles] – Shamoy, thank you very much for joining us. It’s great to be speaking to you.

[Shamoy Hajare Cover] – Hi Indio. Thank you so much for having me.

To start off Shamoy, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in the social enterprise sector?

Absolutely. I started working with entrepreneurs shortly after returning home from a U.S Internship that I received immediately after completing my Bachelor’s degree. It was in 2010, and at the time we were at the peak of a global recession. With that came high levels of unemployment, so returning to Jamaica and trying to find a job was literally next to impossible.

I kept getting the “we regret to inform you” letters, and so at that point, I just decided I wasn’t going to sit and wait for a job. Instead, I started researching NGOs to find something that just felt right.

One day I was watching a random program and came across this feature on an NGO called Young Women and Men of Purpose, and just listening to the founder and observing how passionate she was, I knew I had to be a part of this initiative. After watching the interview, I emailed the organisation and shortly after the founder Lanisia Rhoden responded in just a few hours. Two days after that we were shopping for their annual Christmas treats event and we connected instantly. I just started volunteering at YWOP, and while volunteering there of course what was happening with me personally was at times I suffered a lot of anxiety and I was plunging into depression, because while the experience was truly fulfilling, my focus was on getting the perfect job and it was really taking its toll.

One day Lanisia came across the call for a proposal from the UN Habitat Urban Youth Fund program, and they were looking for promising ideas to promote urban youth development. Immediately we thought about creating a project to promote youth entrepreneurship. At this time, we strongly felt that it was one of the best solutions to create jobs in our town, given the high youth unemployment rates.

For me, this was something that hit close to home and so I jumped to the thought of just being able to do that. We created the Youth Entrepreneurship Project, YEP for short, and we received $19,000USD in funding from UN Habitat. With that, I took on the role of project manager for YEP, and that was a paid position so that was great. The impact of YEP was just phenomenal, we were able to train over 44 young entrepreneurs and we gave 20 of them seed funding. Initially, we created 20 indirect jobs as a result of that. It was a situation where the entrepreneurs we supported ended up hiring other young people in their communities. The project gained a lot of national recognition and attracted great partnerships.

I noticed that a few of the entrepreneurs we worked with had social enterprise ideas and still at that time, I had no idea what a social enterprise was, but I loved the business ideas of these entrepreneurs. So I decided to do some research and discovered social entrepreneurship shortly after that, and I created the Jamaica School for Social Entrepreneurship, JSSE.

It was pretty much just to promote the development of social enterprises in communities. We partnered with the government and carried out a lot of work through this partnership. Interestingly during this time, I received a call for a job I applied for two years prior, and in a few weeks, I was working as a youth empowerment officer at the Ministry of Youth while also working part-time at JSSE. With JSSE and YEP, I just learned so much about entrepreneurship, the highs, the lows, the challenges, the needs, and just learning truly about impact.

Back then I knew social entrepreneurship was the future of business and social enterprises needed access to specific resources and the environment that would actually facilitate growth and impact.

So, what we were doing at JSSE was great, but I knew we needed to do more. I made a decision to close JSSE, and I closed it just after coming up with the idea of Radicle.

That’s a wonderful introduction to your humble beginnings and really the sector as a whole. Shamoy, you’re the CEO of Radicle, which is your initiative operating on a global scale and creating many positive impacts. Could you share with our audience a few of Radicle’s core objectives as a social enterprise?

Our mission for Radicle is to build a virtual social enterprise ecosystem that is both robust and agile, and to also work with global changemakers to develop and strengthen ecosystems on the ground. We want to ensure that these ecosystems are consistently supporting impact focused enterprises.

Some of our core objectives are to help make resources more affordable and accessible to social enterprises operating in the circular economy and to connect young professionals to flexible and meaningful work while helping them to build their credibility as subject matter experts.

We also focus on using AI and data analytics tools to understand business needs, to recommend resources that nurture ideas, to grow circular businesses and to monitor environmental and economic indicators that will actually create measurable impact data linked to the SDGs.

Finally, we want to be able to share this impact data and insights on business progress and best practices to policy makers and global SDGs monitoring entities.

Very interesting, Shamoy. You touched on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and through Radicle work extensively with those goals.

From a personal standpoint for you, which of these goals resonate most with you and the enterprises that you work with?

Personally, just because of their interconnectedness, all of the goals resonate with me. I’m very keen on SDGs, environmental indicators and just overall indicators promoting sustainable livelihoods.

Because of that, that makes all the goals very important to me. I think most of the entrepreneurs we work with feel the same as their missions are aligned with several indicators across several goals. I will say though that no matter the idea or objectives, Goal 17 is a constant for the entrepreneurs we work with, and for us in extension always has a place among the other goals.

How have you seen the social enterprise sector evolve over the past five years, both in Jamaica and globally?

In Jamaica, I’ve seen a lot of progress as it relates to the sector itself. It has truly taken shape and a lot of policy level attention has occurred through great programs such as social enterprise boost initiatives and the development of the Jamaica Social Stock Exchange. I’m not sure if you are familiar with that, but for me that is just so fantastic.