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On the 25th of march Thomas Friemel, founder and chief editor of “enorm – Wirtschaft für den Menschen” magazine (http://www.enorm-magazine.de) and Katja Urbatsch, founding director of “arbeiterkind.de” (http://www.arbeiterkind.de) and Ashoka fellow from Germany joined us for a roundtable.

Thomas Friemel explained that “enorm” is a magazine with a clear socio-political intent trying to contribute to positive change in society. It tries to bring topics like social entrepreneurship and sustainable business to the broad public.

Katja Urbatsch shared the founding story of arbeiterkind.de and her personal motivations to found this initiative, which aims at informing and motivating young people from non-academic backgrounds to start a university study. She build up a mentoring network, numerous local working groups and a website providing essential information on studying for people from non-academic backgrounds.

For social entrepreneurship in the German-speaking world, both of them agreed that there is a lack of support at the very initial stages of start-ups and that it is therefore essential to support social entrepreneurs on the way from idea to actual implementation financially and through mentoring programmes and media coverage.