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On responsibility
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 21 January 2012 - 8:54pm

“Senior bankers, private equity moguls and hedge fund managers appear cut off from the rest of us. They often pay little or no tax, increasingly live in heavily guarded enclaves, and some have little or no real allegiance to Britain. The sources of their wealth are often mysterious, and appear unrelated to merit. These feral rich pose, in their way, every bit as much of a danger to society as the rioters who stole and pillaged London streets last August.“

So writes journalist Peter Oborne, not in a small circulation left-wing magazine but in a passionate outburst in today’s Daily Telegraph. This is not a sign that Mr Oborne or his newspaper have moved away from their conservative position on the political spectrum support but one of a number examples of the fact that some of those now most worried about the ...more

This year’s model
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 19 January 2012 - 8:45pm

Tony Benn is famous for saying that, in his view, there are too many socialist parties in the UK and not enough socialists. Coming at a time when Benn’s enthusiasm for worker ownership is now finally being embraced by leading figures in the Conservative Party – hot on the heels of the Labour government’s nationalisation of the banks – it might also be a good moment for the social enterprise movement to take on board a variation of his thoughts on organisational proliferation.

A danger for the social enterprise movement in the UK seems to be that we end up with too many social enterprise structures and not enough viable social enterprises. The latest suggestion for a new type of company is outlined on the Social Enterprise website by Luke Fletcher of solicitors ...more

Complex analysis
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 16 January 2012 - 2:34pm

It’s an interesting paradox that while David Cameron has so far been a politically successful prime minister – if a general election were held today, he’d be likely to get a better result than he achieved at the 2010 general election – he’s been dramatically unsuccessful in securing support for his major philosophical contribution to British politics.

Having recently co-authored a report on the government’s big policy idea, I well understand the feeling of working on a project that started as an in investigation into how The Big Society might work, and ended up focusing heavily on why it hasn’t worked – at least so far. The RSA seem to have found themselves ...more

Scottish clubs CIC in the right direction
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 11 January 2012 - 3:39pm

There’s been some interesting coverage of social enterprise beyond the traditional outlets over the last week. This article from The Economist about the current challenges facing The Big Issue is well worth a look but perhaps more surprising is an article* in football magazine, When Saturday Comes, on the growing use of the Community Interest Company (CIC) structure by Scottish League football clubs.

According to the article, while lower division clubs, Stenhousemuir and Clyde, are ...more

We are on the brink of a new era, if only…
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 7 January 2012 - 6:07pm

Anyone who was hoping the 2012 was going to be the year when we finally forgot about the social enterprise definition debate has, unfortunately, only had seven days of hope before their expectations were cruelly dashed.

The first contribution (at least the first one I’ve read) on the matter this year comes on the Guardian Social Enterprise site where Declan Jones contributes a piece on ‘The Trouble With Not Defining Social Enterprise’.

Jones definitely succeeds in succinctly explaining a widely perceived problem: “Avoiding definition has also allowed social enterprise to be co-opted by others. We now witness public sector municipalists and private sector opportunists masquerading as social entrepreneurs. The former are zealous mini-state status quo defenders. The latter want to make money on their ...more

Out with the old, in with the new
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 2 January 2012 - 7:47pm

2011 was a big year for social enterprise. It was the year when it became clear that the party really was over for us, too. That for all the coalition government’s warm words about social enterprise that warmth was not going to translate into cash – either in terms of direct funding for social enterprise support or in terms of interventions to tilt the public sector market in our favour.

One way or another, New Labour put a reasonable chunk of money into supporting and promoting social enterprise. That money may not always have been spent on the most useful things but there’s no doubt that it played a big role in building the profile of the sector over the last ten years. Now most of that money’s gone and what’s left will soon be gone too.

The effects of the wind-up of ...more

Taking stock
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 29 December 2011 - 2:39pm

For those of us who worked closely with ambitious start-up social enterprises during the tail end of the first dot.com bubble, the business strategy known as ‘build it and they will come’ is a familiar one. In those days, most thrusting young (or, at least, young at heart) web-based social entrepreneurs had a varation on ‘build it…’ as their elevator pitch. It was a great elevator pitch, you could get it across easily even if you were only going one floor and the pitchee was concentrating on something else for most of the journey.

The least painful stage for ‘build it and they will come’ to fail at is stage 1. While it seems frustrating, those web-based social entrepreneurs who generally lost least money (theirs or other people’s) in the early years of this century were the ones who didn’t actually manage to find the elusive techie who could complete the website to their detailed specifications based on their tiny budget. Slightly more cash was frittered away by those who ...more

Beanbags and Bullsh!t Social Enterprise Xmas Quiz 2011
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 24 December 2011 - 7:14pm

It’s been a challenging year for social enterprise, with no shortage of warm words from politicians and business leaders but a distinct shortage of funding and income generation. Here’s a chance to get into (or remain in) the Christmas spirit with a festive quiz celebrating some of the significant events of the year.

Please email your answers to the email address here. The first correct entry drawn out of my winter hat (or the entry with the most correct answers, or the person who enters) will win an annual subscription to Social Spider‘s popular mental health magazine, One in Four. Closing date: December 31st 2011.

Questions:

1. Assura Healthcare, the private healthcare provider that beat social enterprise, ...more

On sustainability – part two
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 19 December 2011 - 12:37am

When pursuing the holy grail of sustainability, as all charities and social enterprises must now at least claim to be doing, the major emphasis is usually on developing new sources of income.

As the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) Sustainable Funding Project explains: “Increasingly charities are being told to move away from grant dependency, become more business like, earn income, develop an asset base and consider loan finance. And opportunities for delivering public services are increasing. Enabling organisations to see the bigger picture and develop the skills and resources to take control of their future is critical.“

One problem this creates, as already ...more

On sustainability – part one
Posted By Beanbags and Bullshit
On 17 December 2011 - 8:59pm

“What do we want? Sustainability. When do we want it? Soon.”

If public agencies and major grant-funders were a group of protesters walking along the road chanting their philosophies for delivering social change in the UK, that’s the sort of thing they’d be chanting. In most cases, the slightly less snappy follow-up chant would be:

“Whose money do we want it to be paid for with? Someone else’s.”

Sustainability is the current holy grail for the voluntary sector in the UK. The government’s Big Lottery distributed, Transition Fund, awarded cash to organisations to enable them to find ways to survive without lost government funding. For many organisations, social enterprise is one of the suggested routes to that holy grail but clearly both social enterprises, and socially enterprising activities carried out by others, are also themselves mostly still in ...more