The Impact Costs of Work Integration Social Enterprises Research Program
Research into Impact Costs in Work Integration Social Enterprises, informing policy, funding and organisational sustainability.
Work Integration Social Enterprises are they largest group of social enterprises in Australia and internationally. They exist to create jobs for people facing employment barriers, which they do through the sale of goods and services. Therefore, Work Integration Social Enterprises are characterised by both social-impact and commercial production. Unlike their commercial counterparts, Work Integration Social Enterprises incur costs associated with their impact production activities, which are called ‘Impact Costs’.
This long-term program of research is focused on working with Work Integration Social Enterprises to identify, quantify, understand and communicate their Impact Costs. To date, our research has identified 11 different Impact Cost Categories that Work Integration Social Enterprises commonly incur, which we have used to build a do-it-yourself tool in Excel format. This work has already attracted interest from the sector, philanthropic funders, impact investors and governments. A significant outcome from our Impact Costs research is the finding that for Work Integration Social Enterprises, Impact Costs are predominantly variable in nature. This means that economies of scale are not a mechanism for increasing financial sustainability of these organisations – an assumption that previously was commonly accepted throughout the social enterprise ecosystem in Australia.
In our next phase of this research, we are building our Impact Costs Tool as a web application, with the support of the Westpac Foundation and the Paul Ramsay Foundation.
This tool will be freely available to social enterprises and will also be used to generate important data about how Impact Costs manifest, to guide future policy and practice.
Read more about our Impact Costs work:
