Social Enterprise to the Rescue - Shaping Tomorrow Article
New Consumer Values – Generation G
Sheila Moorcroft, Research Director of Shaping Tomorrow has written an interesting article about a new focus on doing things differently through Social Enterprise in the wake of the financial crisis.
Charitable giving in the UK (2008-9) is down by 11% in real terms, representing a fall of £1.3 billion. A similar picture is emerging in the US where the fall is 9%. 2010 is likely to be little better.
A new Social Enterprise, Call Britannia, is an outsourcing call centre targeting major companies’ staffing needs. The company aims to get long term unemployed people back to work, starting with 60 in the first year then rising rapidly. Future plans are to establish a total of 10 call centres in deprived areas, each employing 200 people. With a view to helping 10,000 disadvantaged or long term unemployed people get back to work, the company was the first to benefit from funding from Bridges Community Ventures’ new social enterprise fund.
The continued success of Fair-trade products, sales of which reached a total turnover of around £700 million in the UK in 2008, demonstrate consumer support for ‘business that does more than make profit’, with about 18 million families regularly using these products. Research in the US in late 2008 indicated the potential backlash for companies ignoring ethical and fair-trade issues. These new consumer values have been called Generation G – for Generosity.
The Changing Nature of Luxury, Wealth and Philanthropy
Public disillusion with pure profit, calls for greater financial transparency, greater business emphasis on Corporate Social Responsibility and an election coming up in the UK, provide an opportunity to do things very differently. The need to establish greater clarity about the nature and location of social investments could result in greater tax incentives to encourage Social Enterprise.
Charities and non-profit organisations meanwhile are going to be squeezed between increasing demands for services and reduced income. They are going to be hard placed to meet demand but the Third Sector is seen as an increasingly important provider of solutions to social problems.
Leading the way are new venture capitalists determined to find new solutions, save the planet and make money. With the changing nature of luxury being less visible and more socially aware, the changing nature of wealth being more self-made and less inherited and the changing nature of philanthropy being more of a business approach, all of these changes come into play in the potential success of Social Enterprise.
