Purposeful Collaboration Programme

You must be based in Oxfordshire and have completed Enterprise Oxfordshire's Business Support Tool since the 1st of November 2025 to attend this event. If you purchase a ticket without completing this, your ticket will be cancelled. Business Support Tool - Enterprise Oxfordshire Business

Purposeful Collaboration is a co-created support programme between Enterprise Oxfordshire, OSEP and Co-operative Futures. The programme is designed for small businesses and impact-economy organisations that want to secure larger contracts, strengthen their resilience and collaborate more effectively with others to increase their reach and impact and in turn improve their sustainability.

Small organisations can struggle to access larger opportunities because of limited scale, capacity, back-office infrastructure or visibility. The programme would help participants identify collaboration opportunities, build trusted relationships, design stronger joint offers and become more contract ready. It would also explore practical collaboration models, including partnership working, consortia approaches and co-operative models.

By partnering with social enterprises, SMEs can enhance the social value of their bids and contracts, while social enterprises gain access to larger commercial opportunities, creating mutual benefit and stronger outcomes for local communities.

There are two potential routes for collaborations:

1) Reactive – preparing responses to active tenders / bids / procurement opportunities

2) Proactive – forming joint offers / packages of services collaboratively to approach potential purchasers.

Target Outcomes

The programme will support participating organisations to focus on the following outcomes:

• Launch new collaborative products or services

• Engage with new markets and opportunities.

• Improve productivity or efficiency.

• Create and safeguard jobs

Is your Organisation eligible?

The programme is aimed at micro and small organisations employing fewer than 50 people that have been trading for at least two years, have an established service offer and are looking to grow through collaboration.

The programme is open to social enterprises, enterprising charities, CICs, co-operatives and mutuals with an established trading model and services that could be delivered collaboratively.

For private-sector SMEs, we are particularly looking for service-based businesses whose expertise could form part of a wider collaborative offer or contract . This could include consultancies, training providers, HR and people specialists, wellbeing providers, marketing, creative and digital agencies, environmental and sustainability specialists, construction and property services, transport providers and other professional services.

We particularly welcome businesses already working in, or interested in accessing, public-sector and anchor-institution supply chains.

This programme is unlikely to be suitable for businesses whose primary activity is retailing…