What is a Social Enterprise? Defining Social Enterprise and Social Business

by Clare Jones, Clearly So: https://www.clearlyso.com/what-is-a-social-enterprise-2/

Over the past few years, as ClearlySo has grown and changed, the most common questions we have been asked are: “What is a social enterprise?” and “What is a social business?”.

We used to have a definition for each of these different phrases. We knew underneath both simply meant an organisation that seeks to be financially successful while creating social and/or environmental impact. It has commercial goals and it has impact goals - it is really not that complicated.

With famous examples of these kinds of businesses - Green and Blacks, Divine Chocolate or Ben and Jerry’s - people can understand what it means to consider social impact alongside financial return. But sometimes it has felt pretty complicated. We’ve all made diagrams - like this one:

We argued in 2010 that “The Time for Social Enterprise is Now”:

Many people who approach us ask how social enterprises make their money, or how a social enterprise is different from a business (or indeed how it is different from a charity). Because there is such a range of high-impact organisations operating in such a myriad of ways, these questions are impossible to answer precisely - except that, simply put, these businesses have impact and financial success at their core.

Sometimes it is useful to consider some organisations as “impact first”, like charities, and some as “purely for profit”. This spectrum of organisation types shows the range of organisations working to create change - and there are many. It’s also very limiting. Considering the landscape as “charity vs. company” or “social enterprise vs. social business” obscures the wider movement that sees business and finance as a force for good.

It means considering the majority of businesses (that do not exist with positive social impact as a core metric for business success) against then a small niche for charities, social enterprises, social businesses, co-operatives, mutuals, BCorps, community interest companies … (that list just keeps getting longer).

It means disregarding the idea that all businesses have an impact. Some have overwhelmingly positive impacts, some have overwhelmingly negative impacts, and many fall somewhere between the two.

Although these labels can be extremely useful (think about the Cabinet Office using “legally defined social enterprise” to determine who is eligible for social investment tax relief), and many of our clients are examples of those who define themselves as social businesses or social enterprises, we work with all kinds of high-impact businesses.

Charities like the London Early Years Foundation are run as businesses; they run sustainable models that support their growth and their impact aims. Yes, they may reinvest their profits: this does not mean that they themselves are ‘non-profit’ while traditional companies are ‘for-profit’. Profit, as June Sullivan, their CEO, explains, is not a dirty word.

Justgiving is an online donation platform that has revolutionised how we give to charity - and it is a business.

Businesses can be early-stage ventures or they can be long-established companies that consider every aspect of their social and environmental impact, like HCT. It doesn’t matter to us whether a company is structured as a charity, a company limited by shares, or a community interest company: what matters to us is what they do, how they plan to grow their business, and how they create social or environmental change.

For these businesses, the financial bottom line matters, and so does the social or environmental impact. We have over 5,000 of these businesses in our network, many of which are growing rapidly. We believe that these businesses can be both high-return and high-impact; we do not see an “impact see-saw” where investors and businesses trade off financial returns in order to achieve social impact.

In any industry, different types of businesses have different risk and return profiles. We are simply adding impact to the equation. All businesses have an impact, we just believe they should be accountable for it - and we want to help those businesses that create positive impacts to thrive. We envision a future where if you don’t care about your social impact, you won’t have a sustainable business.

Where great business is founded upon great principles, it is possible to do good while doing well - where enterprise and investment are powerful forces for good.

Image: Aduna, whose superfruits create sustainable livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa.

Extracting Placemaking Tools from Minamisanriku

by Martha Isaacs, MassiveSmall: http://www.massivesmall.com/extracting-placemaking-tools-from-minamisanriku/

The Glass-House Community Led Design is an independent national charity supporting and promoting public participation and leadership in the design of places. 

 

They are a fantastic organisation that exemplifies a Massive Small approach by providing independent advice and hands-on training and support to communities and other stakeholders, helping them to collaborate better to create great spaces and places.

 

In this post, Glass-House intern Martha shares her experience of a workshop that aimed to extract placemaking tools from a resilience story in Minamisanriku, Japan.

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Students from Brunel University brainstorm initial design plans

After The Glass-House Chief Executive Sophia de Sousa returned from her research trip to the seaside town of Minamisanriku, Japan, in November 2013, she knew she wanted to share the story of resilience observed in the community’s rebuilding in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake.

As well as writing extensively about the stories she heard on her visit, Sophia also identified the potential to explore how the response to this disaster might support other places and situations.

Along with research collaborator Dr Busayawan Lam, Sophia led a creative workshop on 18 June, ‘Lessons from Minamisanriku’, that was also the first event of a new Learning Series initiated by The Glass-House to provide a space for learning, inspiring and sharing, and for building new knowledge to support communities to lead changes in their places.

This workshop brought together students and community members in a dynamic exploration of the regeneration tactics used in the Japanese fishing town. Inspired by the Minsamisanriku story, teams developed designs for crisis plans for identified places in the UK.

Team members from diverse backgrounds present their visions for the project

As an intern for The Glass-House, I joined the workshop, and while working with my group, we quickly realised that elements of Minamisanriku’s recovery emerged from parts of human nature that could translate across cultures and situations.

The Irya Yes Kobo artistic space and factory, one triumph built by a local resident of Minamisanriku as a way to reestablish purpose in chaotic disorder, stood as a testament to the power of productive collaboration. Community members needed to find ways to fill their time in the absence of their normal schools, shops and workplaces.

Even though Minamisanriku residents no longer knew whose land belonged to whom in wake of the mass destruction, they decided to focus their energies on crafting together, slowly building up new community spaces within the warm, dry shelter that empowered them to create.

We discovered that this concept of using communal enterprise as a method for generating connections between people could be applied in other scenarios with different sorts of ‘crises.’

Focusing on the example shared by the community leader in our group, who works to empower young people at The Winch youth club in north London, we explored how an enterprising approach could support young people and the wider neighbourhood. Our idea a featured a revitalised youth centre with a beekeeping business, which would allow young people to learn new skills, train their peers and sell their honey products.

Just as the Irya Yes Kobo social enterprise unified Minamisanriku people in a collective quest to foster beauty from disarray, we proposed that youth could improve their sense of self and wellbeing by producing valuable commodities.

Half of the group listens and provides feedback during other team’s presentation

One of the final presentations manufactured in the workshop

The workshop proved an ideal environment for our exploration and we all agreed it was a useful space for innovative thinking. By the end of the workshop, several participants remarked that that group’s diversity allowed them to crowd-source a number of new ideas, while finding consensus in the “common element of believing in the social aspects of community.”

Peer review sessions following each design discussion allowed us to think critically about how our plans could improve. After the first review, each group added more depth and detail to their designs after learning from the other team’s suggestion. One student declared, “hearing the other team’s presentation was the time to learn different ways to develop design.

Designers cooperate to develop presentation outlines

As I embark on my next urban planning adventure in the fall, travelling with a group of twenty students to Buenos Aires, Dakar and Hanoi to compare various city structures, I will keep the lessons gathered from Minamisanriku in mind. Although Minamisanriku faced a unique disaster with specific concerns, the workshop highlighted that some essential components in place are relevant no matter the geographic location.

Placemaking, especially after crisis, must not just focus on the built environment, but the critical social capital that allows residents to feel safe and empowered. Throughout my journey, I will not just observe practical architecture, but I will search for places such as Irya Yes Kobo - the vibrant community hubs that allow for identity and purpose.

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Martha Isaacs is a student of Geography of Human Activity and City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in the built environment’s effect on mental and physical health, and is currently undertaking a two-month internship with The Glass-House to learn more about placemaking in the UK.