EL SPACE
Organization Details
We are Tunisia's first social innovation hub dedicated to change making through entrepreneurship and innovation. We are composed by an active community of changemakers who share a common space, common interests and common values working towards a better Tunisia, and a better world. As a catalyst of social entrepreneurship and the startup ecosystem, we work on empowering inclusive entrepreneurs by hosting, training, and offering networking opportunities for social entrepreneurs through integrated and impactful programs.
Our services are collaborative projects, hosting (through a coworking space in the center of downtown Tunis), events and skills training.
Impact Story
We have a mission of building resilient and empowered communities by helping local groups of active individuals develop themselves in an innovative and self-sustaining way. We work towards this mission by supporting social innovators, from different backgrounds, who are developing innovative solutions to prominent social issues. To reach our objectives we provide an array of services (coworking, mentoring, events and training) to help community members be more productive and achieve their missions.
It took us two years to set up the hub, from 2013 to 2015, and mainly because there was no legal structure for social enterprises to fit our model. We opted for the revenue-driven and hybrid non-profit organization and that led to providing training to government institutions about what are coworking spaces and social innovation hubs and why the country needs these kinds of spaces to provide more opportunities of self-development for youth. Starting our hub was, at the same time, challenging and a happy experience because we didn't have money and we had to be creative and innovate to start projects and make the basis of the organization. Our hub is now recognized for its innovative approach to engaging local communities as we are located in a popular neighborhood and our work is community driven where we act as knowledge facilitators.
Even with limited capacities and resources, we had a great engagement and buy-in from local communities and this approach have been more successful with every location we work at across Tunisia. In being creative in managing limited resources for a higher impact, we have had many sleepless nights trying to experiment and find solutions for impact.
In general, our impact is summarized by the fact that we help youth in Tunisia to be self-sustainable by creating their own businesses.
