Amid Spain’s economic and political problems, there are some remarkable developments happening
in the social enterprise and cooperative sector.
A wide range of entrepreneurial people are coming together and starting to offer new economical and civil
solutions to the country’s biggest problems, like youth unemployment and an ageing society dependent on state pensions.
The success story of Mondragón, once a humble cooperative that produced paraffin heaters and now the sixth
biggest business in the country, is well known. Less well known is that Spain’s cooperative sector now
consists of 22,000 cooperatives, providing 1.2m jobs and a total turnover of €60bn.
From January to March 2013 a total of 223 businesses of this type were created.
Despite the crisis, they have managed to unlock significant amounts of money;
for example, in Peñafiel in central Castilla, the Cocope coop raised €9m in 2010 to build a 7,500m
care residence and a notforprofit cooperative of home owners in Cataluña Nou, has already provided homes
for 778 members (many of whom are disabled) and is in the process of developing more, having raised
€226m in total.
Since the transition to democracy, legislative support for the social economy has been enshrined in the Spanish Constitution, which states that public authorities
“shall efficiently promote the various forms of participation in the enterprise and shall encourage cooperative societies by means of appropriate legislation”.
Spain’s growing interest in social business is notconfined to cooperatives.
Universities in particular, are collaborating with young entrepreneurs to support several social
enterprise initiatives across the country.
The Barcelona based Esade business school has teamed up with BBVA, one of the country’s stronger banks,
to build the Momentum Project that will provide young innovators with the training and mentorship
needed to develop and scale their social businesses.
Spain’s most energetic entrepreneurs and companies are building the right partnerships for social innovation
Brittany Koteles, consultant for Ashoka on social entrepreneurship in Spain and part of the candidate
team for Hub Barcelona, notes however that it is still challenging for changemakers across all sectors
to find the right allies and scale up this emerging movement. This is why the arrival of a new generation of
centres for social innovation is so important in Spain. But leadership in this domain can
also be seen in the work of some regional governments, such as Innovalab,the Basque laboratory for social
innovation.
Meanwhile, beyond the large city centres of Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona FlexiTalent has gone for the grass
roots approach and is currently developing support systems for freelance professionals and
entrepreneurs in smaller regional cities, launching their first FlexiHub in Oviedo, Asturias.
These three developments, recognising the role of cooperatives, new partnerships and emerging collaborative spaces for social innovation, are painting a different picture of Spain.
The term ‘Social Economy’ is more often used to describe organisations that are social enterprises.
A much more defined group of organisations, the ‘social economy’ includes cooperative sassociations,
and mutual societies developed to allow communities to come together·to provide products and services
needed to improve their lives. Whilst in Spain there is no formal definition of a social enterprise,
the social economy has a constitutional right to State support to enable them to start
and grow and accounts for over 20% of employment.