Social Enterprise? What's that?

Social Enterprise is currently being bandied about by politicians as the future of public service delivery and as a means of stimulating the economy and leading it out of the recession. But while politicians are aware of social enterprise, awareness amongst the general public remains limited. 

David Ainsworth of Third Sector magazine reports: 

The powers-that-be have fallen in love with social enterprise. Politicians of all parties are queuing up to sing the praises of a movement that involves tens of thousands of companies and now accounts for more than 1 per cent of the UK's GDP.

But for people who are not closely involved with the social enterprise movement, the term is almost unknown. The vast majority of people are ignorant of it, potential investors are baffled by it and many social entrepreneurs are surprised to learn they are a part of it.

According to the Government, a social enterprise is an organisation 'with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners'.

However, even when this concept is explained to the average person, most still can't name a single example. According to a recent series of interviews conducted by online social business forum ClearlySo, most people asked to name a social business were able to do no better than a vague reference to the Fairtrade Foundation.

It is a problem the Social Enterprise Coalition, the umbrella body for the sector, is well aware of. 'Social enterprise is imperfectly understood even by people who are quite close to the sector,' says Steve Wyler, deputy chair of the coalition and the head of a project to raise the profile of such organisations. 'That's partly because there's still a legitimate and almost inevitable debate about what a social enterprise really is. There are lots of types of social enterprise practiced by a lot of different people.'

Cliff Prior, chief executive of social enterprise support organisation UnLtd, says one problem is that there is no single legal model and no tax breaks for running a social enterprise, which makes it difficult to define them. 

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