For organisations: Partnering with Student Social Enterprise

Who we are

Student Social Enterprise is a hub for UCL students wanting to build social impact ventures, collaborate with community partners and scale ideas. Based in Students’ Union UCL, we exist to create a culture of social entrepreneurship at UCL. We support students from idea to impact through programmes that build practical skills, foster community development and create meaningful networking opportunities.

Partnership opportunities for Social Enterprises

We are always interested in building more relationships with Social Enterprises local and global to connect our students with the ecosystem, socialise the concept of Social Enterprise within the university and support the sector. It's vital to us that these relationships are built on strong principles that deliver mutual benefit to us and our partners.

Our principles

We value and compensate social enterprises fairly for their work (no work without pay).
We centre the voices of those with lived experience of the social issues we're tackling at the heart of our approach (and pay them for their expertise).
We create multiple layers of impact within events (create fair wages for individuals, raise awareness of a social issue/solution, generate new revenue streams for the Social Enterprises, produce work that meets genuine needs of our partners, etc).

Ways of working together

Student engagement

Speaker Series: Inspire our students through short talks.
Site visits: Small groups of students tour Social Enterprise sites, sampling products and/or services.
Student Hackathons: Students team up in small groups to work on an organisational challenge. The sky is the limit here: we've run 1 day sprints as well as week long deep dives, with students providing expertise in areas as diverse as business development, software development, climate science and youth engagement.
Experiences & getting creative!: Whatever your business model, we want to see how we can bring students into it. For organisations with existing experience based offers, we're keen to discuss how we could incorporate this into student activity in both our team and organisation more broadly.

Procurement

Using your products/services: We are keen to buy from Social Enterprises for our events and programming. Some of our current suppliers include Luminary Bakery, Nemi Teas and Queer Brewing.
Championing SEs within the university: We seek to champion Social Enterprise procurement within UCL, creating institutional change. We work with partner organisations to showcase their products and make connections within the university.