Forest fires, common in Greece, would be reduced by a scheme to recycle biomass as well as providing fuel for homes. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
Good ideas? Greece, when you look, really isn't short of them, and people are starting to do something about them.
Ioannis Lagos is an avuncular fiftysomething accountant from the small mountain village of Stemnitsa in the Arcadia region. The village, like many of those in the region, is surrounded by forest. The forest, as forests do in Greece, catch fire, and have done a lot in recent summers.
The main reason the fires spread so fast is the quantity of fallen trees, branches and brushwood on the forest floor.
At the same time, Lagos and some of his friends, volunteer firefighters from Mainalo mountain, have worked out that it now costs roughly €3,500 a year to keep the average Arcadian household warm with heating oil, which is set to hit €1.40 a litre this winter.
Suppose you collected all that forest floor biomass from the 40,000 acres of forest belonging to the commune, turned it into wood pellets – less than half the price of heating oil for the same output – and sold them to local people at slightly less than the average market price? You would be easing the forest fire problem, helping citizens of Arcadia to heat their homes more cheaply (the wood-burning stove they would need would pay for itself within a year) – and you could even pay the salaries of the local unemployed people who did the work.
I won't go into the detail, but Lagos is an accountant and there is a solid business plan: the project is in profit if it sells 2,000 tonnes of pellets; it is targeting a market share of less than 1.5% of the region's households.
By 2017 it should be selling 6,000 tonnes, sustainably sourced from the local forest, and showing a handsome return on investment.
It is, in short, a near-perfect social enterprise, or community interest company: an entrepreneurial activity focusing on social good, financial reinvestment, and sustainability.
More familiar overseas, it's a very new concept in Greece.
"We've only just got the law to allow it," says Fiori Zafeiropoulou, an academic specialising in social entrepreneurship at universities in Greece and Britain who helped the government draw the law up. "Until now, you couldn't combine a social objective with profit; from this month, you can."
Lagos's project, called We Protect the Forest, came second at a recent Athens event, StartUpLive, organised to identify promising social enterprises. The winner was IncludAbility, which aims to fund disability awareness programmes in schools and the workplace by selling consultancy services to companies keen to improve their accessibility to people with disabilities, or as part of corporate responsibility programmes. It also aims to launch a website where people can exchange information on how welcoming and accessible places like shops and restaurants are.
"This really isn't an area that's had much attention in Greece," says Vassilis Kalyvas, one of the project's founders, who has been doing one part of the work voluntarily in Greek schools for several years. "There's EU legislation, but it's not implemented. Disability in Greece is synonymous with incapability, negativity. We need to do far more to facilitate the inclusion of people with disabilities in all areas of Greek life."
Also recognised at the event was Women on Top, which has set up a mentoring network where Greek women can find appropriate mentors for support and advice in their careers. The scheme's Facebook group has 300 members and 13 mentoring pairs already formed; it hopes to fund a full-service website by organising paid-for seminars, selling advertising targeting women, and perhaps charging a small annual subscription to mentorees.
Greece's new law is a good one, says Zafeiropoulou: up to 35% of a company incorporated as a social enterprise can be redistributed, but only to employees on the payroll, and 60% must be reinvested. It's also backed by a government social fund, with a limited amount of money now available for Greek "social co-operatives". She hopes it will lead to more projects like these. Gathered at Loft2Work, a co-working space in central Athens with a strong focus on social business, all agreed that it is simplistic – not to say untrue – that there is "no sense of community" in Greece. It is just that it rather got forgotten. Projects like these fit Greece's current needs, and its mood.
"There are really very healthy cells, micro-environments in Greece that are doing well and working and really achieving good things," says Vassilis. "This is what has to happen in Greece now. We're fed up waiting for the state to act, fed up with waiting for the top to do it. It has to come from the tail, now. We have to do it ourselves."
• Jon Henley is in Greece telling real people's stories. Please contact him if you have suggestions for people he could see or places he could go, or send him your personal story (not too long, please …). He will post as much as he can on the blog
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