Our Background

The Social Economy Unit was established by Partas (then known as Get Tallaght Working) in 1997, with support from Tallaght Partnership and FAS and later received significant support from South Dublin URBAN Initiative.  Its main role is to provide support to community organisations that are engaged in economic activities in order to meet social objectives and tackle disadvantage and social exclusion.  To date, the Social Economy Unit has assisted numerous organisations in Tallaght in developing and managing social economy initiatives, it has advised its counterparts in other areas on their social economy initiatives and it has helped to influence thinking and policy on the social economy at regional and national levels.

Our Values

The mission of the Social Economy Unit is to tackle disadvantage and social exclusion by providing support to organisations that are engaged in economic activities in order to meet social objectives.  In Tallaght, this support is provided directly by the staff of the Social Economy Unit.  Outside Tallaght, we respond to the needs for advice, support and training of professionals in other local development organisations.

The strategies adopted in pursuit of our mission are determined by the particular needs of our clients, but are always driven by our values:

• Inclusivity:  we believe that communities can only address disadvantage by being inclusive, representative and democratic.
• Partnership:  we believe that developing social economy activity requires working in partnership with all relevant statutory, community and local development agencies.
• Facilitation:  we believe that the best way to enable communities to address issues of disadvantage is to facilitate their process of social economy development, not to lead it.
• Empowerment:  we believe that it is our duty to transfer our collected experience to our clients, thereby empowering them to develop their own strategies for the development of social economy enterprises.
• Learning:  we believe that it is critical to our continued effectiveness that we regard our relationships with clients and other development organisations as opportunities for us to learn also.
• Professionalism:  we believe that it is our duty to act professionally at all times in all our relationships and to require similar approaches from those whom we engage with.
• Equality:  we believe that our mission to tackle disadvantage and social exclusion will not be achieved if, by our actions, existing inequalities are perpetuated or old inequalities are replaced by new ones.

Our Activities

The activities currently being undertaken by the Social Economy Unit in pursuit of its objectives can be categorised as follows:

• Project incubation – we work with clients at every stage of the development process of their enterprises, helping with research, business planning, funding applications and other issues that might arise.
• Management development – our clients have needs for different skills and we endeavour to supply them with advice and expertise in a range of functional skills, such as marketing, finance, planning and personnel management.
• Training and consultancy – we offer structured training, from time to time, to local development organisations and social economy enterprises.  We also undertake business plans and other work as consultants to other organisations.
• Communications and networking – we publish a regular bulletin containing information of interest to local development organisations and social economy enterprises.  We have also established SENT (Social Economy Network Tallaght) – a group of our clients which meets on an informal basis to discuss topics of interest and share ideas.
• Social auditing – we are at the centre of a number of initiatives designed to promote social auditing among social economy enterprises.  These include the establishment of the Institute of Social Auditing of Ireland and the development of accredited training courses in social auditing.
• Policy development – we participate in major regional and national policy discussion groups and have worked with ADM in the development and dissemination of the New Frontiers series of information booklets on the social economy.