Scaling Catalyst is a great opportunity for us to expand our tools and empower all social economy actors even further towards scaling their impact. The project will not only increase our knowledge and skills to support social entrepreneurs in this critical point of their journey, but will also allow us to share our learnings and insights from developing and implementing a dedicated scaling readiness program.
With 91% of Social Entrepreneurs (SEs) in Europe wishing to scale their enterprises, Scaling Catalyst seeks to bridge a critical gap.
Helping social entrepreneurship grow and scale its impact is so important – it’s what turns a great idea into real, lasting change. With the Scaling Catalyst project, we’re teaming up with amazing partners across Europe to make sure our organization and other support organizations have the right tools to guide social entrepreneurs through the scaling process.
Although vocational education and training (VET) opportunities for this target group have increased in recent years, very few SESOs - such as incubators, accelerators and networks - currently provide training programmes linked to scaling. Scaling Catalyst will address this by equipping SESOs with the knowledge and resources needed to launch effective scaling support initiatives. This, in turn, will support SEs across the European market to develop further and increase their impact.
At Pulse, we believe in the transformative power of social entrepreneurship to drive meaningful change. The Scaling Catalyst project represents a crucial step toward empowering support organizations with the tools and knowledge they need to help social entrepreneurs thrive.
The project will run until August 2026 and will focus on creating new tools and training materials for SEs. Based on data collection and validation of needs, partners will develop and test a new Self-assessment tool and Guide on scaling for SESOs. They will be shared with a broader audience through webinars, an online helpdesk and media campaign.
Every day, our work is to support social and solidarity enterprises to tackle their development and scaling challenges. We have joined the Scaling Catalyst project to share our expertise with other SESO and accelerate the movement towards a strong social economy, at the service of people and the planet.
Partners will also individually develop new in-house training tools for scaling, aided by a process of peer learning, and user-testing, that will enable more widespread adoption of scaling programmes for SEs.
We are true believers in the inclusive and regenerative economy and the only way we see this coming into reality is by positive impact economic actors being successful, robust and having a market, both capturing the local community but also having the opportunity to open new markets. This is why this project, which enables us to provide better support and knowledge on 'how to scale' for our beneficiaries is very important to us, and we are grateful for the opportunity to do better.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Universitets- och högskolerådet. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
