Resource library
This library offers a curated collection of valuable tools, guides, and resources that exist in the social enterprise sector. Explore guides, articles and many more to support your journey, whether you’re starting a social enterprise, tackling sector challenges, or navigating the impact economy.
Suggest a new educational resource or update here to help keep this library useful.
168 results found
Project Drawdown is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to identifying and scaling science-based solutions to combat climate change. Focused on equitable, safe, and effective approaches, the organisation conducts research, engages stakeholders, and promotes solutions to drive meaningful action. Through storytelling and collaboration, Project Drawdown shifts the narrative on climate change from despair to possibility, offering practical pathways for individuals and organisations to contribute to impactful climate action.
This article by Adam Kahane introduces ‘radical collaboration’ as a transformative approach to tackling systemic challenges. By integrating love, power, and justice, it fosters empathy, empowerment, and fairness among diverse stakeholders. This method aims to align differing interests and capacities, enabling inclusive and impactful systems change while navigating inherent tensions in collaboration.
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Raise Finance, BCCM
PlatformsThis guide offers essential insights into how social enterprises can expand funding beyond grants and donations by involving their community and members. This guide focusses on how you can achieve this by using a co-operative structure for your social enterprise.
This resource from the Australian Indigenous Governance Institute (AIGI) examines the significance of relationships in First Nations governance. It covers cultural, community, and environmental connections, balancing roles, building trust, and fostering effective partnerships. The guide also explores allyship, network expansion, and practical strategies for creating balanced, respectful collaborations within Indigenous communities and beyond.
SafeWork Australia offers resources for workplace health and safety, including psychosocial safety. Black Dog Institute supports mental health with free NSW training. Local SafeWork bodies, like SafeWork NSW, also provide helpful resources.
Seedkit
PlatformsSeedkit is a nationwide project and platform that helps social enterprises measure and communicate their impact. Its self-managed reporting platform allows social enterprises to measure, track, and communicate operations and impacts via customised dashboards and reports.
Self-determination is vital to the governance and aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, enabling them to lead decision-making, exercise sovereignty, and build community-driven governance systems. This toolkit section outlines principles, pathways, and practical steps toward self-determination, including nation building, treaty processes, and sustainable development.
Service Design Tools is an open-access platform offering methods and templates for designing user-centered services. With tools spanning research, ideation, and implementation, it supports collaboration and co-creation across diverse contexts like healthcare, education, and social innovation. Suitable for both beginners and experienced designers, the platform provides resources to facilitate inclusive and impactful service development.
This framework categorises leadership into seven stages, from Opportunist to Alchemist, reflecting increasing complexity and transformative impact. Each stage highlights unique approaches to challenges, relationships, and organisational goals. Leaders can progress through feedback, self-reflection, and embracing new responsibilities, with growth beyond the Achiever stage requiring deep self-awareness and the ability to challenge assumptions. Teams led by Strategists are most adaptable, benefiting from diverse perspectives and innovation to navigate complex challenges and drive organisational transformation effectively.
Justice Connect’s guide helps social enterprises with legal needs, covering structures, governance, setup, compliance, and operational issues for all stages.
"Social Investment Explained" was produced by the Big Lottery Fund and Social Enterprise UK. It aims to help community and social enterprises understand investment options and readiness requirements. While it’s UK-based it offers good questions for consideration for Australian organisations too.
This manual offers social entrepreneurs a practical guide to building relationships with social investors, covering the investment landscape, strategies for finding and approaching investors, and best practices for due diligence and negotiating lasting partnerships.
This 40 minute video uses real life examples to share how to build, launch and optimise a simple social media strategy. It is a pragmatic guide for small organisations with limited resources and time-poor people wearing multiple hats.
It’s difficult to keep up with the latest trends in social media. Hootsuite regularly updates its advice and offers many free tools for planning and posting on social media. This page pulls together 35 different templates and while they won’t all be relevant to you there are some useful ones in there.
This web portal provides access to a library of documents related to Victoria's Social Procurement Framework, which governs how the Victorian Government undertakes social procurement when procuring goods, services and construction. It includes the framework itself, case studies, buyer guidance documents, and other resources. This information provides insight into how a government entity approaches social procurement. For social enterprises, it offers guidance on how to engage with government buyers, and demonstrates the types of social and sustainable outcomes a government is likely to be seeking to achieve through its procurement activities.
This video tutorial covers what social procurement is, key drivers, how the Social Traders marketplace works, and what you need for your social enterprise to be ready for social procurement.
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Social Shifters
PlatformsSocial Shifters is an international charity helping the next generation of young leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs to tackle the world’s most pressing social and environmental issues in new ways. Their website offers e-learning, videos and downloadable digital tools to support social enterprise startups.
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Social Startup Studio
PlatformsSocial Startup Studio is an initiative by Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Its goal is to support and foster the development of social enterprises. The studio website offers a huge range of practical resources for social enterprise startups.
This report by the British Academy and Power to Change examines how social infrastructure strengthens community resilience. It highlights key spaces, their role in fostering inclusivity, and policy recommendations for maintaining and enhancing social infrastructure.
While not specifically about pitching, this comprehensive guide serves as an excellent resource for preparing a social enterprise pitch. Use it as a valuable checklist and preparation tool, to help organise your thoughts and information in a way that resonates with investors, partners or supporters.
This resource explores the power of storytelling in addressing climate change - its underlying ideas can be applied to other areas of impact. It argues that while the science and technology for combating climate change exist, what's missing is the right story to motivate action.
Discover the Story Canvas—a practical tool to craft impactful, strategic stories tailored to your needs. Designed by Digital Storytellers, this downloadable canvas simplifies storytelling for nonprofits, social enterprises, and impact organisations. With step-by-step guidance and resources, it helps you create engaging stories that inspire action and advance your cause effectively.
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Support for businesses in Australia
PlatformsThis Australian Government website offers essential legal and governance info, covering business laws, risk management, health and safety, plus tools and templates.
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SVA's 'Employer Innovation Lab'
PlatformsThe Employer Innovation Lab by Social Ventures Australia helps employers improve recruitment and retention by addressing barriers young people face in the workforce. Through a structured, collaborative program, businesses develop and scale inclusive employment strategies to create meaningful career pathways.
This resource explores the importance of systems thinking in social enterprise, advocating for interconnected approaches to tackle complex challenges. It introduces key practices, including adopting pluralistic perspectives, fostering collaborative networks, and addressing systemic issues through targeted interventions. By focusing on relationships, complexity, and leverage points, social enterprises can drive meaningful change while balancing specific actions with broader systemic goals.
QSEC and Gov Ready held an interactive webinar exploring how social enterprises can get procurement ready. They shared practical tools and strategies to help social enterprises prepare compelling applications, demonstrate value, and build long-term readiness for public sector opportunities.
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Community-owned cooperatives are growing in regional Australia, particularly in Victoria, as innovative responses to market failures and threats to local businesses. By providing essential services and reinvesting profits locally, examples such as Yackandandah Community Development Company (YCDCo) and renewable energy projects demonstrate their impact. These models prioritise community ownership, resilience, and local economic benefits, yet are underrepresented in mainstream business education. The article examines their increasing adoption and potential to address community needs effectively.
TACSI is a social innovation lab that supports organisations and communities in designing impactful solutions to complex social challenges. Using human-centred design and co-design methods, it provides toolkits, case studies, and frameworks to transform services in areas like ageing, mental health, housing, and disability.
Discover the basics of customer journey mapping—an end-to-end visualisation of your customers' experience. This article explains how journey mapping helps you understand customer needs, improve design processes, and boost satisfaction and loyalty. Learn its benefits, how to create a map, and use insights for better customer experiences.
A stakeholder map captures the ecosystem surrounding a product or service from a specific perspective. This article explores what stakeholders are, the importance of stakeholder mapping, and the steps to create an effective map. It includes downloadable templates, a walkthrough video, and guidance on prioritising stakeholders, illustrating relationships, and analysing value exchanges.
This is a useful guide and template for creating effective investor presentations. It combines crowd-sourced input from top industry experts and the author’s personal experience. It also shares examples, practical design tips and strategies for addressing investor concerns.
The Collective Impact Toolkit by the Tamarack Institute provides practical resources to help communities and organisations tackle complex social challenges through collaboration. It offers frameworks, tools, and case studies to support systemic change.
The Community Investment Handbook is a guide for communities and practitioners on establishing cooperatives to meet local needs, raise funds, and build circular economies within the framework of national legislation.
The Community Well, also known as the Social Sector Wellbeing and Resilience Hub, is an online resource designed to support charities, not-for-profits, and social enterprises. Created to address stress and burnout in the social sector, it offers curated tools, practical strategies, and advocacy for systemic change, fostering sustainable mental health and resilience practices.
Systems change offers a way to address complex social issues like poverty and homelessness by moving beyond traditional, linear problem-solving. This blog contrasts ‘clock’ problems, which are solvable with structured solutions, with ‘cloud’ problems, requiring ongoing adaptations. It emphasises the need to shift from quick fixes to fostering resilience, healing relationships, and supporting long-term system health to address deep-rooted challenges effectively.
The Cynefin Framework guides leaders in matching actions to context by distinguishing different domains. It enables sense-making, helping leaders identify true complexity and respond effectively to challenges.
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'The DIY Toolkit', NESTA
GuidesNESTA is an independent charity based in the United Kingdom that works to increase innovation capacity in the UK. They have developed this toolkit to help people invent, adopt, or adapt ideas that can deliver impact. It features 30 practical social innovation tools that are quick to use and simple to apply.
IDEO is a global design agency known for its human-centred approach. This Field Guide to Human-Centred Design represents how IDEO thinks about design for social impact. It includes 57 clear-to-use design methods for new and experienced practitioners, plus case studies.
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The Funding Centre
PlatformsThe Funding Centre is a portal providing information on grants and fundraising in Australia. It is an initiative of Our Community, a social enterprise that provides advice, tools and training for Australia’s community sector, as well as services for business and government.
Frederic Laloux's article explores Teal organisations, a progressive management model emphasising self-management, wholeness, and purpose. It outlines organisational paradigms, highlights successful examples, and offers insights for social enterprises to balance purpose and effectiveness, even with partial adoption.
This guidebook, made by and for social entrepreneurs, covers building effective boards to balance social mission with financial goals. It includes advice on governance structures, board composition, recruitment, roles, and managing conflicts, highlighting how governance needs evolve as social enterprises grow.
This guide introduces the Participatory City model, designed to create vibrant, inclusive neighbourhoods through active resident engagement in practical projects. It offers principles, methods, and insights for addressing social challenges and building community resilience, serving as a valuable resource for policymakers, community leaders, and organisations.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas explores ethical dilemmas, moral boundaries, and collective responsibility. This powerful story serves as a lens for leaders facing difficult choices between systemic stability and moral courage, prompting reflection on individual rights, collective good, and principled action.
This video offers an alternative framework for creating a Theory of Change. It’s led by Chris Gaines from SoPact, a US-based social enterprise.
The ReGeneration Rising podcast, by RSA Oceania, explores regenerative approaches to redesigning communities, cities, and economies, fostering a thriving planet. Hosted by Dr Daniel Christian Wahl, it features renowned guests across two insightful series.
The RegenNarration Podcast showcases inspiring stories of ecological regeneration and community resilience, featuring leaders in conservation, sustainable farming, and Indigenous land management. Through interviews with activists, scientists, and community leaders, the podcast explores innovative approaches to sustainability and regenerative practices. It offers practical insights and resources, empowering individuals and communities to contribute to environmental regeneration and build a more resilient future.
This is a paid resource. Written by Ian C. MacMillan and James D. Thompson and published in 2013 the book provides a step-by-step framework for launching and scaling a successful social enterprise, drawing on the authors' extensive experience in entrepreneurship and social innovation.
This report shows social enterprises, led 50% by women, make up 3% of global businesses, generating $2 trillion revenue and 200 million jobs across 80+ countries.
This framework highlights how to create sustainable social impact by addressing systemic factors that maintain social and environmental challenges. It introduces three levels of systems change—structural, relational, and transformative—emphasising the importance of shifting policies, power dynamics, and deep-seated beliefs. By engaging at all levels, organisations can drive meaningful, lasting change that is resilient, inclusive, and adaptable.
Just Gold held an interactive webinar to share insights and lived experiences from autistic social entrepreneurs and encourage the social enterprise sector to create inclusive, affirming environments for neurodiverse thinking and practice.
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