What is Cultural Shift?

Cultural Shift South East was an action research and resource development programme for the social economy in the South East England Region. It aimed to stimulate social changes and service improvements through socially entrepreneurial partnerships between the public, private, voluntary and community sectors.

The programme had five key operational areas:

1. Research

2. Demonstration Projects

3. Policy influencing

4. Tools for cultural and regulatory change

5. Network and brokerage

In 2003 SEEDA undertook research that identified partnership with mainstream service providers as a key factor in creating sustainable social enterprises that offer inclusive employment to the most excluded. This study also identified that partnership approaches were limited by regulatory and cultural barriers between the public and social enterprise sectors.

The Cultural Shift partnership had two strategic aims:

These objectives were achieved by working through a transnational, multi-partner based action research process of participative design and development to create demonstration social enterprise projects, which worked effectively with mainstream agencies.

This process created policy tools and models that will be mainstreamed into regional policy and will set off a process of further social enterprise development.