Sustainability, Social Enterprise and Capacity Building

Joanne McNeill, Community Capacity Building Officer Social Enterprise, Parramatta City Council

Date:		Thursday, 15 July 2010
Time:		1-3pm
Venue:		Senate Room of the Lincoln Building (C8A 310)

**RSVP: limited places please RSVP by Friday 9th July for catering purposes to rochelle.spencer@mq.edu.au**

About the Discussion

Social enterprise is an evolving field of activity in Australia. While still coming to grips with defining social enterprise, advocates agree that it is centred on social objectives with profits reinvested in the enterprise coupled with the generation of a social return. Social enterprise is a practical model that provides an important 'how' strategy for delivering on much wider agendas, such as activating community participation, fostering innovation and developing leadership capacity in communities. The model operates from the premise that engaged citizens are critical in effectively tackling social and environmental issues at the community level.

The Development and Community Capacity Building Research Cluster invites you to join in conversation with a leading expert in social enterprise, Joanne McNeill.

Joanne will talk about how social entrepreneurs offer innovative solutions to tackling pressing social issues offering new ideas for social change. Joanne will discuss her learnings from her Churchill Fellowship which investigated the diversity of public sector approaches to supporting social enterprise activity in the UK, Canada and USA.

About the speaker

Joanne's current role in social enterprise development at Parramatta City Council commenced in January 2007 and is the first of its kind in local government in Australia. A keen advocate of this model Joanne was an early member of the Social Entrepreneurs' Network in the early 2000s and spent her childhood in a socially enterprising community. Prior to the move to Parramatta she was a senior communication and consultation specialist with Sinclair and Knight Merz, managing consultation programs for environmental management and infrastructure development projects for (mostly) public sector clients. Previously Joanne was the Network Relations Manager for the pilot of the Prime Minister's Community Business Partnership Initiative where she worked closely with a diverse range of stakeholders to stimulate the uptake if corporate social responsibility practice nationally. Joanne is currently undertaking a Master of Business (Research) focusing on social impact assessment and social enterprise, and holds a Master of Arts in Communication Management and a Diploma in Management Studies. She has worked in the not-for-profit sector; developing business and marketing plans for small businesses; in events management and community theatre; and also spent two years living in Guatemala with her then young family working in textiles and export industry.

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