Social Franchising of Community Trails

• Social franchising is the application of commercial franchising concepts with a focus on achieving social benefits beyond economic profits. Franchisees are supported to achieve the social impact values, principles and outcomes as articulated by the Franchisor.
• This project seeks to determine the viability of social franchising, specifically of community-led trails—basically walking tours—that generate revenue for local guides recruited from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds.
• The trails themselves also act as a means of connecting local community partners (non-profits, businesses, grassroots, schools etc) who might participate or be featured in the trails. It also aspires to generate a stronger sense of community, identity and pride in each locality, and ultimately stronger trust and social cohesion at the neighbourhood level.
• Social enterprise Skillseed has designed and facilitated such community trails with AMKFSC and now intends to equip other non-profit organisations or resident-led businesses to run their own community trails. See https://www.skillseed.sg/resilience-trails
• Skillseed will attempt to equip and support resident-owned and run businesses as franchisees, or work with a non-profit organisation to hold this as a programme first before divesting it to residents.  

• For guides: Operating such trails provide flexible micro-work opportunities for locals in their own neighbourhoods, offers an opportunity to acquire transferrable work skills for future employment, and the possibility of becoming a business-owner together with other residents.
• For participants: The trails themselves have a social objective of generating empathy, awareness and understanding of the lived experiences of disadvantaged communities.
• For neighbourhood: 
  • Local community partners and stakeholders have more opportunity to connect and collaborate with one another (grassroots, local businesses, non-profits etc.)
  • Neighbourhoods that participate also have an opportunity to highlight their unique features and offer opportunities for placemaking with the community. 
  • If the residents themselves participate in such trails, it will help raise awareness of the needs and issues of residents, and build a stronger sense of community, identity and pride in each locality, possibly even stronger trust, and social cohesion at the neighbourhood level.

Broader Significance of Social Franchising

• A social enterprise can only scale its social impact by expanding its operating capacity, which typically requires access to capital. A social franchising model is a potential means of scale at greater pace by equipping other organisations that already have the operating capacity to take on a tested product line.
• Unlike a business franchise, a social franchising model should have more of a two-way relationship so that ground insights from franchise operators can feed into the franchisor’s model.
  

HOW SKILLSEED RUNS ITS COMMUNITY TRAILS

• Co-design of trails with community guides based on their strengths: Trails are developed with local residents by exploring their lived experiences, interests, stories, relationships and what they value in the neighbourhood. For example, if the resident has a deep interest in the arts, a hands-on art jamming session may be created as part of the trail.
• Guide is paired up with facilitator: Guides are initially paired up with a volunteer facilitator (another resident) to help build stronger ties to the community (and also that they receive support for conducting trails?).
• Format of Trails: Each trail comprises 4 segments – 1) Pre-trail briefing session, 2) Trail itself, 3) Sit-down conversation with the Guide and 4) Reflection session led by a volunteer facilitator (without the Guide being present).
• Recruitment of Participants: Currently, Skillseed markets existing Trails to schools, government agencies and corporates. In this scaled up programme, we will explore tighter partnerships with Volunteer Centers in the selected neighborhood who have connections to corporates who wish to volunteer in the community. They will also explore how to work with Resident Committees who organize learning journeys for residents. Schools in the selected neighborhoods could also be a potential pipeline of participants.
• Local Area Coordinator: a local resident whose role is to facilitate connections between Community Guides and other residents, share relevant information (e.g. available resources or community assets as organically identified by the different Community Guides on their Trails) and serve as an informal source of support to the Guides, including helping to facilitate problem solving without relying on formal sources first.
  

APPROACH AND PROCESS

1. Consolidation of best practices and SOPs into a Playbook and Training Curriculum
2. Selecting and equipping Franchisees in different neighbourhoods (4 in total) to train and support local Community Guides and Local Area Coordinators.
3. Engaging stakeholders to secure buy-in from other key partners in the neighbourhood (e.g. VCs) who may also offer supportive social services to Guides if they need them.
4. Trial-runs of Community trails; support and troubleshooting for our Franchisees.
5. Refinement and launch of actual Trails by Franchisees; documentation of insights and lessons learned.
6. Evaluation of the feasibility of scaling the RT programme through the social franchising model
7. Development of Exit to Community Strategy - Based on what we have learned, Skillseed to create an Exit to Community strategy for our pilot AMK community, and explore how we can become an aggregator and platform for all of such Trails run by Franchisees across the nation.