Humanity is facing the challenge of a lifetime. While this will be a painful time for many, social enterprises have an unprecedented opportunity to do what we do best, together.

Social Enterprises exist to tackle social problems or create an environmentally sustainable society. We are at the forefront of innovation, looking for ways to address the needs of the communities in which they operate. CoVID-19 will, for better or worse, test our best solutions to scale immediately.

That’s why we need to weave community, share resources and trade skills in this time of crisis. Around Australia, the social enterprise community has been organising itself into more coherent and visible networks with extraordinary leadership. That leadership is calling you to join a national social enterprise response in service of Australia’s long-term future.

To help assemble the network into greater collaboration, StartSomeGood, Social Change Central, Impact Boom and Social Impact Hub are partnering with Digital Storytellers to promote the conference. Invitations are being made through the state-based social enterprise networks, including the Social Enterprise Council of NSW and ACT (SECNA), along with SENVIC (Victoria), SASEC (South Australia), and QSEC (Queensland). Other supporting organisations include GreaterThan (virtual facilitation expertise) and various fellows from the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (impact entrepreneurship network from New Zealand).

The event relies on the volunteer contributions of many people and teams across Australia, at a time when all of us are facing significant strife in a multitude of personal and professional ways. Your participation and support of the event is key to its success.

What’s an Unconference?

In the Unconference format, no central figure writes the agenda. Instead, we crowdsource the agenda and participants choose what conversations they wish to create or to join. The conference is being supported by Sydney-based Digital Storytellers to provide facilitation, narrative strategy and the necessary technical support. More on Unconferences here.

How will this all work?

Due to a limitation in Humanitix's platform, please know a single ticket for either session gives you all access -- we'll invite you to join everything as soon as you register. So if you buy a ticket for Wednesday or Friday you're all good. Don't buy both. We'll refund you if that happened.
On Wednesday 1st April from 1-230PM we’ll release the agenda submissions process and walk hosts through how to submit ideas. Submissions will be ‘open’ from this point.
On Thursday 2nd April at 12PM we’ll close the agenda submissions process.
By Friday 3rd April at 11AM we’ll finalise and publish the agenda.
From 1PM-5PM on Friday we’ll run out the Unconference.
Finally, from 5-6PM Friday we’ll host speed breakout networking for those who want to stick around.
You don't need to attend everything if you can't -- you can come and go for the planned sessions as you please, but you do need to register to be able to do this.
Let’s acknowledge that this is the first time most of us we’ll be doing this, and many things will be imperfect. However, the speed of our response is important now.

Do you need to know more? See our live FAQ document where we're answering questions live now.