Confronting long term unemployment through social entrepreneurship

The focus of this article is a social entrepreneurship initiative in Ireland that aimed at training long term unemployed people from 11 deprived areas in the Dublin region for jobs in the information technology industry. The initiative comprised a partnership of industry, government, state training agencies and local communities. Adopting action research as the methodology, the paper describes the evolution and construction of the design and implementation of the project from the perspective of first, second and third person research practice. The paper reflects on the outcomes from the initiative to date and concludes with a description of a possible model for dealing with similar persistent social problems.