Seed Funding for a FairShares Institute for Co-operative Social Entrepreneurship

Sheffield Business School has been awarded £20k from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to develop a business case for a FairShares Institute that advances knowledge on co-operative social entrepreneurship.  The FairShares Model is a product of research at Sheffield Hallam University that has been disseminated through a collaboration between staff and students at Sheffield Hallam University, Social Enterprise International Ltd and participants in Co-operative and Social Enterprise Summer Schools between 2009 – 2013, hosted by Sheffield Hallam.

In 2015, Dr Rory Ridley-Duff published a book called ‘The Case for FairShares’ which become central to an EU Eramus+ Grant application by organisations in Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.  The EU Project (“European FairShares Labs for Social and Blue Innovation”) will run until 2019, and will pilot the application of FairShares Model values and principles in social enterprise development.  The HEIF fund is being used to explore how a FairShares Institute can advance research / knowledge transfer using the intellectual outputs of the FairShares Labs project.  So far, the Institute has appointed a research fellow (David Wren) and recruited international panels to support the work of the Institute.  An academic panel has members that come from New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Denmark and the UK.  The practice panel members are based in New Zealand, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, USA and UK.