BI’s Green & Social Entrepreneurship Toolkit

Carol Appel Head of Training Youth Business International

This April we have been celebrating YBI’s first Green & Social month, celebrating entrepreneurship that delivers profit with purpose and creates solutions to the huge environmental and social challenges we face. As part of #YBIGreenAndSocial, this month we launched our Green & Social Entrepreneurship Toolkit to our network.

The Green & Social Entrepreneurship Toolkit brings together a collection of 12 tools developed by entrepreneurship support organisations around the world, specifically aimed towards start-ups and existing businesses with a social and green focus. These tools cover a range of areas, from legal health checks to business future proofing, and build on YBI and our global network of members’ knowledge and experience of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to working with green and social entrepreneurs.

The toolkit is aimed at organisations wanting to start or to improve their work with social and green entrepreneurs, and can be used by trainers, coaches and mentors to adapt their existing content and activities to the special needs that social and green entrepreneurs have. It can be used flexibly – from picking just one or two tools for sporadic use, to combining various tools into a training, mentoring or coaching programme.

We developed the toolkit between October 2021 and April 2022 in partnership with 6 members: Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (India), CAP Youth Empowerment Institute (Kenya), Habitat (Turkey), ideiaLab (Mozambique), Somo Africa (Kenya) and Youth Business Spain. So far it has been tested by our members CAP-Youth Empowerment Institute, Youth Business Spain and Habitat, with hugely positive feedback from entrepreneurs, mentors and trainers.

Going forward, we will continue to develop the toolkit in partnership with members, entrepreneurs and experts in the field including developing new tools from scratch for additional areas. At the moment, the toolkit is exclusively available to YBI’s members, but in the future we hope to share it more widely as an open resource for all those looking to support young green and social entrepreneurs.

To find out more about YBI’s support for green and social businesses, read our new paperShaping a more Inclusive, Equitable and Sustainable Future: Supporting young social and green entrepreneurs. To find out more about becoming a member and having access to our global network, exclusive training and events, and resources like the Green & Social Entrepreneurship Toolkit, visit our membership page.