Are we networking in vain? Towards a Very Big Society

Dear Roy and Enis,

What a boost you gave me this week announcing  the launch of a joint UK – Serbian social business in Sandzak, the poorest region in Serbia.

Your enterprise will produce organic meat and vegetables, employing 50 families – 3 people per household. You don’t look for public funding to start and plan to make the business profitable in 4 years.

How shall we call this but Big Society… actually a Very Big Society growing across borders and boundaries?

This week we ran the final conference of Euclid’s exchange programme to foster knowledge sharing and partnerships between Serbian civil society and EU-based peers.

20 Serbians and 20 peers from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK spend a week with the EU host. This week was the return leg in Serbia.

At least 15 pairs are planning a follow up. Roy and Enis are one of them.

This pilot programme has proved that exchanges are a great way to build personal relationships and start new social businesses, but must demand led and not limited to Brussels – as it happens with People2People exchange programme. They deliver but must be customized not standardized.

Too much money is wasted in study visits and research projects that don’t achieve much at all. On the contrary, international networking combines a learning experience with new joint initiatives. It should be oriented as such.

This the lesson I retain and want to share with fellow Europeans especially in the UK. Too often international work is reduced to aid and big society confined in national borders. That nationalist mindset is hard to kill.

Roy, you exemplified the value of such exchanges at the end of your speech: ‘There are more opportunities for a charity in Serbia than the UK but you must make the investment now when there are the right conditions to run a multimillion social business in 10 years, and we can do it better than any other commercial business’.