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Ten Irish social entrepreneurs received a financial boost today when they were awarded €100,000 each from the Arthur Guinness Fund to develop their enterprises.

The winners, whose projects include a scheme to encourage textile recycling and a suicide-prevention service, were chosen from 484 hopefuls who applied to the fund in October last year.

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Batt O’Keeffe presented the cheques at a ceremony at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. He said social entrepreneurs were central to Ireland’s economic and social wellbeing.

“Social entrepreneurship puts people and communities before profit,” he said. “It is an approach that helps citizens become active in their own communities and the result is an overall benefit to society itself.”

The fund was established in 2009 as part of the Guinness 250 celebrations. It is designed to provide financial assistance and business expertise to social entrepreneurs, defined by Guinness as people with “a business head and a social heart”.

The company donated €2.50 cents for each of one million signatures collected in pubs to establish a €2.5 million fund, which will be invested over two years.

Award winner Margaret Leahy is developing a model for community gardens in conjunction with community organisation Clár IRD. She said she was “thrilled” with the award.

“It’s fantastic because at the moment a lot of the traditional grants have ceased because of lack of funding,” she said. “This project would still be something in my head if it wasn’t for Arthur Guinness.”

Mediatraining.ie chief executive Gavin Duffy was one of ten external judges and said choosing only ten winners was a difficult task.