Café Ingeborg: Socio-economic value creation in a municipal context

The narrative is part of the Find & Enlarge movement. Success stories of innovation in the public sector.

We are Café Ingeborg - an employment-social-hybrid based on §103 of the Service Act, which is part of Ringsted Municipality. We have existed since 2011 and since our inception have worked to ensure meaningful employment for people with special needs by solving real and significant tasks for the entire Ringsted Municipality.

The Challenge and the Ambition

In Café Ingeborg, we have a great desire to spread our way of doing protected employment in the hope that more people with special needs have valuable and meaningful work. In dialogue and work with other municipalities, we find that several municipalities lack knowledge of the framework for protected employment in relation to the municipal power of attorney and the ancillary calculation model, which we feel can be an obstacle in relation to the proliferation of offers such as Café Ingeborg.

Unlike many municipalities, where sometimes there may seem to be a narrower interpretation of which tasks/which sales may be in §103 offers in addition to the municipal power of attorney, Café Ingeborg makes greater use of opportunities for the sale of consequential production — the ancillary model for municipal business. This means that, as a §103 offer, you are allowed to earn money as long as the main purpose is to drive employment and that the products you produce and sell are by-products of the main purpose.

Our ambition is to be able to spread our experience in creating the framework for our §103 offer and inspire other municipalities to do employment in a new and innovative way, where value creation for all parties involved is at the heart.

The solution - a social economic innovation

All municipalities are obliged to offer protected employment under §103 of the Service Act. In Ringsted Municipality, the city council chose back in 2011 that part of protected employment should be about increasing the quality of life of the municipality's senior citizens through tasty food. This resulted in the creation of Café Ingeborg, where what could potentially have been “a mere expense” for protected employment was transformed into an important resource in the form of real food production that supports communities and the good old life in the municipality.

Since 2011, Café Ingeborg has grown to be a recognized brand of joy that creates social entrepreneurship with innovation at the forefront. Since our inception, we have gone from 8 employees to over 100, who handle a wide and colorful range of tasks every day for the entire Ringsted Municipality. We cook food from scratch for the elderly at the municipality's care centers, provide the municipality's meeting services, organize various events in our café, run a café at the municipality's library, grow herbs and vegetables for our own food production in our garden, cook home-smoked food in our own smoking oven, have a communication department with the production of videos and graphic design, wash the home care's cars and provide minor services- and caregiving duties at the municipal care centers. We also have a food truck, which allows us to drive around the country to events such as Madens Folkemødet and community events at Omø, as well as helping to revitalize food communities in villages.

Our newest shot at the tribe is that from April 2024 we have taken over the operation of the café in Ringsted Sportscenter, where we will serve halal food and draft beer at all TMS home matches, as well as provide the townspeople with a festive setting to hold confirmations, weddings, funerals, etc. We will also participate in larger events such as Ringsted Children's Festival, Ringsted Messe and much more, so that no event will be too big for us — and we are looking forward to it. The café in Ringsted Sportscenter opens up a lot of new development opportunities for all employees in Café Ingeborg, and also a new way for us to conduct employment, which will require even greater flexibility and both evening and weekend work for everyone.

At Café Ingeborg, we are not interested in the concept of target group. We look at each person and their resources and want to create a valuable working life that makes sense for the individual. The staff group in Café Ingeborg therefore ranges widely and includes both people with acquired brain damage, Down Syndrome, autism and other functional impairments, all of whom contribute in their own way to the daily operations.

Café Ingeborg also houses a diverse selection of 13 different professional groups, ranging from chefs and artisans to academics, the unskilled and social educators. This is to ensure and maintain high professionalism and quality in solving our diverse tasks.

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Value Creation — Measurable Results

Real tasks:

The basis for the work tasks solved by us in Café Ingeborg are real needs, which create valuable results at all relevant levels:

1. The work done by employees in Café Ingeborg is really meaningful and not 'just' an offer of employment
2. Solving existing tasks for the rest of the municipality for the benefit of citizens — real value creation
3. Positive financial results are created by solving tasks that would otherwise have been solved by other means — e.g. by external companies
4. There is a high level of well-being among all employees, as a result of which the core task is lifted in a meaningful way, involving the individual employee all around

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Scale:

Café Ingeborg currently has approximately 100 employees, which is relatively large compared to the size of Ringsted Municipality, where approximately 35,000 inhabitants live. The growth in the number of employees from 8 to 100 since 2011 is partly due to good results for Café Ingeborg's 103 employees, partly to real value creation with good financial results, and partly to thinking and working across and not in small internal and isolated initiatives.

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Accessory model of municipal enterprise:

Unlike many municipalities, where there seems to be a narrower interpretation of which tasks/which sales may be in continuation of the municipal power of attorney, Café Ingeborg makes greater use of opportunities for the sale of consequential production — the ancillary model for municipal business.

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Value base:

In Café Ingeborg we work actively based on a specially defined value base (read more here) and with a very value-based management style. A clear expression of the application of our value base is that all employees of Café Ingeborg are considered - and not least consider themselves - as colleagues, regardless of whether they are ordinary employees or special employees (special employees = § 103 employees, in many other places called citizens/users).

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Co-creation, gift economy and cross-cutting cooperation:

Gift economics is in Café Ingeborg's DNA — the premise is that all people have resources and the desire to make these resources available to others. It is an internal driving force in Café Ingeborg, which is also made available to the rest of the municipality, local communities, as well as nationally and internationally. This applies both when Café Ingeborg facilitates the coupling of lonely elderly with families with weak children in generational cafés, when resources are made available for food communities and other local initiatives in villages, as well as when employees from Café Ingeborg teach at professional colleges, provide resources for inspirational visits, participate in EU projects, etc.