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It started in the cities. Things always spread fast there. Taking people unawares; hitting the banks, trading floors, exchanges!
 Illustration by Ben Tallon/ benandink.co.uk
The quickest, canniest and bravest were the first to fall sick; you could see the greed in their eyes, in their gait. They were somehow different, keener and hungrier than the rest of us - and we were at their mercy. A virus like that there's no controlling; we all wanted a taste of its sweet rewards. Bittersweet.
Our contagious wanting formed a gruesome swelling, stretching the skin of society until the inevitable eruption of stinking poison. The sickness gripped us all; through politics, through business, through everything - there we were, revelling in its glorious side effects and ignoring the nausea in our bellies because "it hasn't taken us out yet, so where's the harm?"
But look at us now. We're running scared; afraid to leave our houses, to load up our trolleys, to fill up our cars. Pouring from the morning papers, the lunchtime bulletins, the evening news - it's everywhere and we're nowhere, searching for something to cling to and pull us back from the brink.
We need a new way to trade. A lifeline that can help heal our society, not sicken it. It's out there, this greed antidote. It's been around for years but the virus made us blind to it. So now's the time. Time to open our eyes to a different way of doing business!
It's pretty bleak out there. You can't pick up a paper or turn on a TV without hearing about the economic meltdown that is kicking off all around the world. From mortgage lenders going bust and share prices plummeting in America to bank bailouts and petrol prices hiked up here, in times like these it's difficult to feel optimistic about anything economy related. The collapse of the financial world as we know it has had a direct impact on our way of life, making the poor poorer, our climate hotter and our moral fibre, well, stringy to say the least. But for one growing group of entrepreneurs the global meltdown offers a ray of hope, a chance to make us wake up smell the coffee and change our money grabbing ways for the better. Welcome to the dawn of a new age, the rise of the social entrepreneurs.
The concept of social enterprise actually dates back to the industrial revolution when philanthropic businessmen like George Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree dedicated large amounts of time and money to social reform; buying plots of land to build low income housing, providing the first ever pensions for their workers and introducing doctors and dentists into communities that didn't have them. However, today's social entrepreneurs have taken it a step further, shifting from businesses that have social concerns, to businesses that centre everything on them. These businesses deliver to a triple bottom line - social, environmental and financial - rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders.
"It's about recalibrating how society works," explains Lindsey Hall, director of the Real Ideas Organisation (RIO), a Southwest-based social enterprise which specialises in delivering programmes and projects for young people to help them make their ideas happen. "Moving away from an oppositional relationship between financial success and social good to something more constructive and sustainable."
It might sound a bit brown rice and sandals, but in fact it's anything but. The social enterprise sector is growing, fast. There are around 55,000 social enterprises operating in the UK with a combined annual turnover of £27 billion, contributing £8.4 billion per year to the European economy. From well-known social enterprises like the Eden Project and Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, to new outfits like the Real Ideas Organisation, or The Sofa Project (a furniture redistribution company based in Bristol) - the range of businesses that qualify as social enterprises is as vast as the changes they are making in their communities.
In 2007 Fifteen, which employs around 90 people, had a turnover of £4,000,000 and all its profits were invested into recruiting and training young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to become accomplished chefs. The Sofa Project's attention is focused on providing people with affordable furniture. Every year the business helps over 6,500 households a year to furnish their homes at affordable prices and collects over 25,000 items a year that would otherwise have gone to landfill. On top of that it provides work opportunities for the unemployed and recent offenders through schemes like New Deal and Pathways to Work.
The finance firms, banks and professional services could learn a lot from social enterprises like these; making money and doing good at the same time, but surely they would never embrace the idea of a triple bottom line? Think again. John Mulkerrin took the experience he gained from his Hong-Kong based career in finance to set up Quotes4Charity, the first ever financial services community interest company (CIC), which offers expert help and advice on mortgages, life cover and home insurance and uses its profits to generate income for clients' chosen charities.
"While in southeast Asia I came face to face with the very worst of people, exploiting the extreme poverty and corruption rife throughout the region," John explains of what motivated him to set up the groundbreaking CIC. "I realised that there had to be a better way to do business that would create positive social outcomes through trade, so the idea of a financial services company that makes money for charity was born." Quotes4Charity has gone on to win social enterprise awards and recognition across the sector for its pioneering approach to business and charity.
However, starting out a business on socially responsible principles is far from easy. "You need to be an entrepreneur and then some," Sam Conniff founder of social enterprise and youth marketing agency Livity explains in an interview with Business Zone, "you've got to pay the rent, deal with staff and find clients just like any business but in addition there are real social measures you have to mark yourself against."
It's all laudable stuff but minimal in the grand scheme of things. The real challenge is how to switch minority to majority and turn the whole world onto the social enterprise way of thinking. For the Real Ideas Organisation the solution is obvious. Working with the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA), RIO is building a learning module for schools to get young people involved in and excited about social enterprise from an early age. "Through the NESTA programme we can support young people to develop an understanding of the ways of working so ably demonstrated by organisations like as Eden," Lindsey Hall continues, "this will equip them not only to gain jobs in such organisations in the future, but to start their own - to become a generation of social entrepreneurs. We are looking to enable children and young people to design a future where the value of the social, environmental and economic is widely understood, accepted and applied."
What organisations like RIO, Quotes4Charity, Livity and others are trying to do is big. And risky. It's going to take a lot of work and investment to get people to see business differently, not as a mechanism for individual profit but as a means to improve society as a whole - whether its offering a better deal to coffee farmers in Brazil, providing opportunities for the disadvantaged to get training, or financially supporting charities in the work they do. But it can be done. And one thing's for sure, a future where the world is healthier, communities are stronger and people value people more. Sure sounds better than the world we have got right now.
It's about beating the sickness. It's about taking the greed antidote. It's about making changes. Here's hoping it's something the business world will eventually swallow.
www.realideas.org
www.edenproject.com
www.sofaproject.org.uk
www.quotes4charity.co.uk
www.livity.co.uk
www.fifteen.net
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