Community Sector Trading
This course aims to support voluntary and community organisations to understand how they can develop their trading activities to grow and diversify their income streams.
A hands-on approach
Download the Community Sector Trading flyer
Visit the Community Sector Trading website
Community Sector Trading aims to support voluntary and community organisations to understand how they can develop their trading activities to grow and diversify their income streams. It is a free learning programme that provides a hands-on approach to helping community organisations develop a business idea and think about future planning, highlighting case studies of how others have succeeded.
This learning programme focuses on:
1. Building strategic plans for new ventures
2. Learning how to pitch new ventures
3. Thinking about investment readiness
Who should participate?
Participants will come from voluntary and community organisations who want to consider trading, and their advisers who want to improve the support they offer. Both groups will become more confident and skilled in assessing the viability and sustainability of earned income options.The course will be of value to:
National, regional and local VCS infrastructure organisations
CVSs and local Change Up partnerships
Business Link franchise holders
Regional social enterprise agencies
SKiLD (Skills & Knowledge in Local Development)
Trustees of small community groups
Lead managers of small community groups
Non-finance specialist managers and generic workers
Delivery and Learning style
We believe that people learn best from exploring real examples and practicing their own probing and problem-solving skills with inspiration and experience on tap. Understanding enterprise is like art or sport - you need to practice and you need to reflect, preferably with the encouraging input of someone with far more experience in an environment structured for learning.
Each learning programme consists of a two day residential that will introduce case studies and tools on successful enterprise in the community sector. This is an excellent opportunity for peer-to-peer learning, an important source of support for community and voluntary groups. This will be followed by four online Action Learning Sessions over the following couple of months. Each of these sessions will focus on real examples of community organisations that have developed trading and give participants an opportunity to practice developing and selling their ideas.
What is involved?
Each course programme will consist of a small group of participants called the Action Learning Set who will meet face-to-face at the beginning of the programme for a residential session. The rest of the learning will take place online, through four online Action Learning Sessions over the following couple of months. Each online Action Learning Session will last two hours with a short break and will focus on real examples of community organisations that have developed trading.
Course Dates Autumn 2009
We are now accepting applicants to our Autumn 2009 course. If you would like to take part in the course please visit the Community Sector Trading website and complete the online expression of interest form. The deadline for submitting expressions of interest forms for our Autumn course is 14 September 2009.
Two day residential session (London) - 5/6 October 2009
1st online session - 22 October 2009
2nd online session - 5 November 2009
3rd online session - 17 November 2009
4th online session - 1 December 2009
Final face-2-face meeting - 15 December 2009
For further information please contact Haoming Yau at h.yau@dta.org.uk.
