Currently, our world is facing grand challenges that ask for urgent (socially and ecologically) sustainable solutions. Never before have the fields of Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation been in such a high demand to offer answers to these problems.

In our Project BUILD, we focused on empowering students to develop innovative business ideas with a special focus on nature based solutions applicable in our cities.

However, Sustainable Entrepreneurship itself comes in many forms and ways.

The EU-Project IN SITU focuses on social innovation, more specifically on empowering socio-economically disadvantaged pupils to try out the journey of social entrepreneurship. This EU Project is implemented in 6 countries, one of them being Austria, Vienna. Did you know that in Vienna 18,6% of youth between 15-24 are unemployed? This target group is often also called NEET (Not in Education, not in Training).

Vienna’s regional IN SITU partners, WU Vienna and the Board of Education have the following mission:

“To make Social Entrepreneurship inclusive by creating spaces of inspiration and empowerment, where citizens – disregarding their background – are seen as creators, not targets, of social innovation”

The partners of the IN SITU Project want to change the narrative of who is a Social Entrepreneur & support our target groups to become Social Innovators themselves.

To tackle this challenge, the IN SITU social innovation hub will start in autumn 2020 with a tailored training series for NEET’s. The main goal is to raise the labour market chances of these disadvantaged groups with the support of free trainings & workshops. Furthermore the participants get the chance to discover their potentials, expand their competences and finally create their own social project.

If you are interested in this topic and want to learn about the methodology of social entrepreneurship behind it, you can find it on the In Situ Database for free!