Trading for Good

For what it's worth, I just joined this directory of social enterprises. How come it's taken government so long for this to be seen as necessary?

I was reminded of the time that we joined the Social Enterprise Coalition and asked why they were sending out emails of new member details but hadn't included us. There were too many to include all, I was told. So as a software developer I made the obvious offer - let me help you create a directory of members.

That ended our conversation. It wasn't the first hint that this was something that a comfortable few wanted to keep for themselves. A scarcity mentality which is hardly conducive to building a social marketplace    So instead, I started the ,  

It was much the same experience when offering to help out on the development of Your Square Mile - There might be a role for us later. It was almost as if they were threatened with the prospect of open collaboration. I haven't heard a lot about it since.    

A few years ago, I joined an independent evaluation service called See What You Are Buying Into, now known as Profit through Ethics.  It cost more than 800 pounds and many hours and delivered not one commercial enquiry.

"When you buy something, does it matter to you where the profit goes?" Asks Nick Hurd 

From experience I know that it doesn't mean a thing. Customer don'r buy on the basis of what you'll do for someone else, it's the service you deliver to them. As we pointed out so many years ago, we conduct business for profit and use that profit in the social cause of our chossing rather than return it to private hands. It marked a departure from the traditional grant funded approach to social entrepreneurhip,adopted by UK government.     ,

"It is only when wealth begins to concentrate in the hands of a relative few at the expense of billions of others who are denied even a small share of finite wealth that trouble starts and physical, human suffering begins. It does not have to be this way. Massive greed and consequent massive human misery and suffering do not have to be accepted as a givens, unavoidable, intractable, irresolvable. Just changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around--if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be "Me first, mine first"; rather, "Me, too" is more the order of the day."

Following the success of a microfinance initiative in Russia we became a UK business with the primary objective of tackling poverty in 2004, when we introduced the comcept of a 'community funding enterprise' to government and the social enterprise community in our business plan.  

In Re-imagining Capitalism, the New Bottom Line, I describe how "profir for purpose" was reasoned