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    The Real Issue in Social Entrepreneurship

    http://blog.vita.it/theunreasonables/2008/11/04/the-real-iss...
    27 days ago in The Unreasonables · Authority: 7

    © 2005 Caroline Thomson. Reading Nick Temple is always a pleasure. The Policy and Communications Director at the School for Social Entrepreneurs in London is a great source of information on social entrepreneurship, and has a good habit of expanding the debate well beyond its conventional walls. Take for example his stabs at a fund manager who dare criticise the business model of CafeDirect. Or his weekly round-ups, full of interesting links from all over the world (including myself, thanks Nick!). Nick is definitely a must-read for those who love social entrepreneurship. So - as someone so devoted to the “cause” - why would he list “definition” as a top issue in social entrepreneurship? This is something that really puzzles me. Nick recently wrote a great post about the Top 5 Controversies in Social Entrepreneurship. The inspiration came from a similar post on Change.org, which listed the following 5 issues as central to the field of social entrepreneurship: - Individual vs. collective - Definition - Scale - Symptoms vs. causes - Non-profit and for-profit relations Since Change.org is a US site, Nick rightly felt the need to tweak the list to the UK context, listing the following 5 more British issues: - Scale - Importing private sector practices - Definition - Role of the individual - Public service delivery Perhaps it’s just me, but while I find most of these really important and controversial topics (public service delivery particularly so in continental Europe, while in the UK I feel the debate is less heated, and there are even calls for social enterprises to run the entire NHS!), ‘definition’ stands out as altogether rather academic. In my experience, most social entrepreneurs are practical people, who grapple with complex social issues and find innovative and entrepreneurial ways to solve them. I don’t know many who spend their days mulling over what social entrepreneurship really means. Take the example of Laila Iskandar, the CEO of the Egyptian social enterprise Community & Institutional Development, who was one of the key presenters at this year’s Edinburgh Social Enterprise World Forum (report on PDF here). Her recycling work in the slums of Cairo demonstrates not only the potential of social entrepreneurs to solve some critical social and environmental issues, but also the relative futility of trying to stick on them some form of label. Is Laila the social entrepreneur closer to a private sector consultant (as her legal status would suggest), an NGO practitioner (as her work would make us think) or an activist (as her personal style would indicate)? In truth, I think she’s a bit of all three. But does defining her identity really matter, as long as she’s doing great work? You judge for yourselves on this YouTube video. If I may suggest a little change to Nick’s list, I would say perhaps the most crucial issue relating to social entrepreneurship is how it fits into the new paradigm of the sustainable economy - indeed, how it is shaping the entire debate. Since the future of our global economic system depends heavily on building a new sustainable form of capitalism, demonstrating how social enterprises are at the core of this emergent economic model (which itself is far from defined) would do far more good to the sector than any academic agreement over what a social enterprise really is.