COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs to launch its 2021 Roadmap at Davos

25 January 2021 – A radical new mindset and approach are needed to drive transformative change in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. 

As a member of the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs, we are excited to announce that today the Alliance launches its 2021 Roadmap at Davos, in support of social entrepreneurs on the frontlines of the crisis. It spotlights 10 areas in which it will collaborate in support of social entrepreneurs around the world. 

The Alliance is a World Economic Forum initiative formed in April 2020 in partnership with global leaders in social entrepreneurship. It was clear that as the novel coronavirus advanced across the world with devastating effects, none of these organizations was in a position to respond to the magnitude of the crisis on their own. Nine months later, what started as a small group of collaborators has grown to include over 83 social enterprise leaders that represent more than 50,000 entrepreneurs, who jointly called on their peers to take action in support of social entrepreneurs everywhere in a shared Action Agenda.

The 2021 Roadmap outlines 10 action areas and 21 concrete projects through which the Alliance members will collaborate this year. EN has committed to add to the Roadmap by collaborating intensively on multiple topics, mostly on: Policy Change, with our peers at Catalyst2030 and the Schwab Foundation among others, to push the economy to become a social economy; Data and Infrastructure, with our colleagues at Impact Hub and SAP to investigate if social entrepreneurs across the world can seamlessly connect to the resources and decision makers in today’s world; Corporate Access, with Acumen, Ikea Social Entrepreneurship and Yunus Social Business among others, to work together to strengthen the case for social sourcing. Several EN members have committed their support to these actions, such as Social Enterprise NL, Groupe SOS and others. 

As stated in the article Why 2021 can and should be the year for breakthrough collaboration by Melanie Schultz- van Haegen (Porticus), Francois Bonnici (Schwab Foundation) and Carolien de Bruin (Alliance): “It is now time to grow these pockets of cooperation and partnership, to think bigger and more strategically. For those of us that work to support social entrepreneurs, our role must be to put in place what Otto Sharmer describes as the “architectures of connection”.

It allows us to link systems of changemakers to hold the space for diverse actors to connect across boundaries of institutions, interests, political views and worldviews. In this way, we can unlock social entrepreneurship to support the recovery and The Great Reset.

It will also include an attempt to collectively surface those “corporate-ready” social entrepreneurs across our networks. As they recover from the crisis and rebuild their businesses, these entrepreneurs are able to supply or serve corporations, providing inclusive, social procurement options to organizations who are on their own path to a new way of working.