Social enterprise
19th May 2011
I have spent the last two days immersed in the concept of social enterprise (which, without getting into a definitional knot, is the broad idea of balancing social purpose with financial viability). I attended a WINSENT event called Catch the wave: getting on board with social entrepreneurship. The organisers had aptly used a surfing logo and the theme was carried right through to the Surf Seeds dotted around and the Hawaii 5-0 music at the start of the conference on Tuesday; nice touch!
The main attraction was Jerr Boschee, social enterprise guru from the USA. He was a very good and highly personable speaker, although he clearly tried to cover too much content in his Tuesday afternoon slot and his full day masterclass on Wednesday, which I had been fortunate enough to have gained a place at. This meant there was not adequate space or time for discussion of social enterprise in the Irish context (nor Welsh context, as this was a joint Ireland-Wales event), nor of how the lessons from America might, or might not, translate here. Whilst social enterprise is clearly an important piece in the jigsaw of making the world a better place, there appears to me to be a lot of muddled thinking about what social enterprise/entrepreneurship is (and a lack of recognition that Ireland has a rich history of social enterprise in terms of its long-standing cooperative movement, for example). With declining income streams from traditional sources, however, I think there will be many more events and discussions over the coming years, to thrash these issues out.
In the meantime, I came across a great post dated 13 May 2011 from the oddly named popse! or The Pop-Up Social Enterprise Think Tank: popping policy bubbles … in the UK. It lists 100 social enterprise truths. Here are my favourites:
4. More-than-profit is better than not-for-profit (profit’s not a dirty word).
8. If a pound was donated each time a social entrepreneur quoted Gandhi, no-one would need to fundraise.
9. Teach too many men to fish and you screw up the entire marine ecosystem and deplete the fish stocks.
10. Scale of impact is more important than scale of organisation (or scale of ego).
20. Social enterprises overestimate what they can achieve in the short-term, and underestimate it in the long-term.
23. Even if you call them a client, an end-user or beneficiary, the customer is still king.
29. Buy from other social enterprises, and get them in your supply chain: but only if they deliver.
42. Charm and ‘being nice to people’ are enormously underrated.
93. Survival rate is meant to refer to the business, not the social entrepreneur.
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