110 6. Sustaining social organisations in rural areas Sandy Whitelaw INTRODUCTION The favouring of a broad social enterprise-based model for creating and delivering services and initiatives is to some extent based on an assump- tion that such a model has the potential to achieve temporal, social and economic sustainability in a context where this is often perceived to be dif- icult (Buchanan, 2010). A contention can be made that within both broad welfare provision, and speciically the nurturing of social enterprises, the concept of sustainability and the related notions of ‘capacity’ and ‘imple- mentation’ have tended not to be given the prominence they are perhaps due (Potter & Brough, 2004; Phillips, 2006). By explicitly attending to these foundational matters in the context of social enterprises, this chapter seeks to redress such a deicit. In the context of the particular challenges of delivering services to older people in rural areas on a realistic and on-going basis that informed the O4O: Older People for Older People (O4O) project these concerns are clearly crucial, and this recognition informed the O4O approach of exploring the possibility of older people providing support for other older people as a proitable way forward. In practical terms the vast majority of O4O projects have, to varying levels, been concerned explicitly with mechanisms that might contribute to achieving a level sus- tainability. By drawing upon perspectives from both general and social enterprise-speciic sustainability literature, this chapter primarily seeks to develop a discussion of the broad nature and prerequisites of sustain- ability for rural community social enterprise. Thereafter, these resources are deployed to speciic experiences that arose from various O4O projects using data gleaned from a ‘sustainability template’ completed by each O4O social enterprise and complemented by in-depth semi-structured interviews with a range of individuals involved in these, in Sweden and Finland. Finally, I suggest that there is a relatively strong and growing evidence base that informs our understanding of how sustainability might optimally be achieved within social organisations (e.g. Coburn & Rijsdijk, FARMER PRINT.indd 110 26/03/2012 08:15