Vintage Baby social enterprise
Updated: 19/08/2018
Solution provider
NorwayVintage Baby Social Entrepreneurs is a social enterprise in Sandefjord (Norway). The organizations overall goal is to find new methods through which to integrate women with minority backgrounds into the working world. We have close cooperation with our local city council, and provide services for Norwegian Labor and welfare department, both on a national and local level. Providing alternative education for women that do not succeed to learn sufficient Norwegian, and basic labor skills, through traditional training provided by the county.
The organization started as a project in 2014, training and hiring women with migrant background and no or unknown education, whom are unemployed and speaks little Norwegian, migrating to Norway from countries outside the OECD. The organization has bin accredited with funding from the National Labor department (Arbeids og Velferddirektoratet), Innovation Norway and the department of Inclusion and diversity. In addition, our methodology has been used as an example of best practice at several occasions; by University NORD, KS (national county organization) and this summer the former parliament president will visit our project to learn from our practice within our field of expertise. VB are also mentoring several other projects in Norway. As the methodology is considered to be innovative and a new approach to reducing unemployment in a marginalized group trough social entrepreneurship.
Our social enterprise based in value creation from skills connected to traditional household tasks: Catering, Cooking, Cleaning-services, canteen services and running a café that also functions as our primary practice arena for the interns from the target group. We both train and hire, and the former unemployed women in the project sold services for around 250 000 Euros in 2017.
We use a sociocultural learning perspective in integration work, through which we hope to reduce unemployment in our target group. Through this, we also hope to fight poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion of our target group. We actively strive to help our participants enter the job force. We also hope to build bridges between marginalized groups and society. In Norway, we work together with both local officials and private organizations to achieve this. Using this method, we have successfully employed women who, in the past were unable to learn enough Norwegian to access the job force in Norway. This method can and should be used in other parts of Europe.
The organization has 10 paid staff (8 from target group and 2 administration/teaching/development staff). There are at all times a group of five interns from the target group, and 2-3 voluntaries working with the organization.
