Economic sustainability models in Portuguese Social Organisations: mobilisation and market resistance

Abstract

Economic sustainability - as a concept that embodies the balance between efficiency in the execution of a mission and the ability to mobilise and obtain resources for its fulfilment - currently materialises one of the main challenges of social organisations. From a theoretical point of view, the approaches of social entrepreneurship (e.g. Dees, 1998) and social innovation (e.g. Mulgan, 2012), tend to target the professionalisation of the management of non-profit organisations, justified, among other aspects, by the need to diversify financing models. The social enterprise model has been gaining some robustness in Anglo-Saxon countries, demonstrating the success of hybrid financing models. Using a mixed methodology, the models of economic sustainability of Portuguese social organisations were analysed, trying to understand how they relate to the representations of leaders on social innovation, focusing attention on the Portugal Social Innovation Mission Unit (EMPIS), a "public initiative aimed at promoting social innovation and stimulating the social investment market in Portugal and mobilising around 150 million euros from the European Social Fund, under the Partnership Agreement with the Portuguese State" (Portugal Inovação Social, 2015). The research carried out analysed the narratives expressed in 16 interviews with leaders of social organisations at grassroots, representative (sectorial, regional and national) and political levels regarding economic sustainability, creating a system of categories that allowed the identification of management trends on the evolution of sustainability models in recent decades. Based on this categorisation, an online survey was created and answered by 150 leaders of social organisations at grassroots level. It was concluded that social organisations tend to use a strategy of greater diversification of sustainability sources to mitigate the risks of dependency on a single source of financing. Simultaneously, it was found that although the number of financial support opportunities for organisations has increased and diversified, there is a significant number of organisations that continue to consider the opportunities to be scarcer. It was also concluded that the participation of the organisations surveyed in public programmes to foster hybrid models is low.