Flywheel Cincinnati to host new round of social enterprise workshops

Social enterprise hub Flywheel will soon start a new round of workshops for Cincinnatians interested in starting social enterprises.
 
The workshops are one of the ways Flywheel provides training to potential social entrepreneurs, along with educating the public about social enterprise and nurturing a social entrepreneur community.
 
The workshops, which have been offered since 2011, were recently re-branded from a “Social Enterprise 101” concept to “Exploring Social Entrepreneurship” and “Becoming a Social Entrepreneur.” According to Flywheel Executive Director Bill Tucker, the rebranding was influenced by Flywheel’s Social Enterprise Cincy arm, an effort to bring together the best of different types of social enterprise.
 
“It goes right back to when we launched the Social Enterprise Cincy brand,” Tucker says. “It was with the idea of bringing best practices from for-profit spaces into the nonprofit space.”
 
Tucker explains that various sectors of social enterprise do different things exceptionally well. While nonprofit social enterprises are often especially good at delivering services, for-profit social enterprises tend to be better at branding and marketing.
 
The upcoming workshop series will bring the strengths of both those sectors together for people considering social entrepreneurship as a way to make their ideas a reality. The three workshops build on each other to create a detailed how-to guide for social entrepreneurs.
 
Exploring Social Enterprise (8:30 a.m.-12 p.m. Feb. 22) will serve as an introduction to the concept of social enterprise, exploring how individuals might be situated to start a business for social good or a business where society profits.
 
“This is for the beginners,” Tucker says. “Maybe someone who has an idea and wants to see if they’re going down the right path.”
 
If they are, they could follow up on March 22 by attending Becoming a Social Entrepreneur (8:30 a.m.-12 p.m.). That workshop will get into the details of determining if a social enterprise is a feasible idea, giving attendees the tools “to evaluate their business so they can fail quickly and fail cheaply,” Tucker says. He explains that about one third of people who take Flywheel training actually decide not to start businesses, “and we consider that a successful outcome.”
 
For those who do decide to start a venture, the third workshop in the series is Business Plans That Stand Out (8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. April 22), providing a longer, more in-depth exploration of the best ways to create a plan for their enterprises. That event is sponsored by Interact for Health — which hosts the meetings at its Roodwood Tower offices in Norwood — and is the only workshop with a fee.
 
Tucker encourages potential social entrepreneurs considering the workshops to think outside the box, because social enterprise doesn’t have to mean just traditional nonprofits.
 
“We’ve trained a ton of people in the community around starting businesses that have a social purpose,” he says.
 
It’s likely that, with the continuation of these classes, they’ll train a ton more.
 
Register for one, two or all three workshops here.