The Indian company Jaipur Foot provides world-class artificial limbs, rehabilitation aids and other appliances to physically challenged individuals living in poverty and don’t charge the beneficiary even a single rupee for it. Social entrepreneurship at its best!

About Jaipur Foot

Jaipur Foot is a non-profit social enterprise with 20 staff across India and services 65,000 patients each year, 20,000 of whom require new leg and feet replacements. The remaining 45,000 require crutches, wheelchairs, hand-peddled tricycles and other aids. This makes Jaipur Foot a global leader in prosthetic science, production and manufacturing as well as surgical in its fiscal discipline. In addition, they distribute their products to another 25 countries.

The company was founded in 1975 with less than US$10,000 budget and is now operating with an annual budget of US$3.5mio. It is funded by government support (30%), donations (60%) and earned income (10%). The whole marketing of Jaipur Foot is closely tied to their culture of accountability and the high quality of their products. Both donors and governments want to know whether their money is being used for intended purposes and in the most efficient and effective way possible. Therefore, the organization’s steady growth is rooted in rigid expenditure policies and cent-by-cent accounting coupled with a suite of incredibly cheap, world-renown prosthetics, aids and appliances.

The Product

Jaipur Foot’s $45 ultramodern prosthetic is simply unmatched when compared to a similar $12,000 limb produced in the United States. The Jaipur Knee is made of self-lubricating, oil-filled nylon and is both stable and flexible. Comparable devices produced in other countries generally include a titanium replacement which can cost $10,000 or more. What sets Jaipur Foot’s products apart is their lightness and mobility and those that wear the limbs can even run, climb trees and ride bicycles. The new knee replacement was developed in cooperation with Stanford University and costs a mere $20. For this great achievement, the Times Magazine named it one of the 50 best inventions in the world. Devendra Raj Mehta, head of the Jaipur Foot team, believes that “Too often the NGO sector relies solely on sentiment. We need to marry sentiment with science.” – and they are definitely very successful in doing exaclty this!

Entrepreneurs in Myanmar increasingly take a commercial approach to charity through small social enterprises that sidestep NGO and government bureaucracy and ensure that help reaches those in need directly.

Social Enterprises in Myanmar

Yangon alone is home to several businesses with a social focus. One example is FXB Myanmar, a company that provides vocational training and business opportunities to HIV positive workers and women that were rescued from the Thai sex industry.

Another company is Proximity Designs, a manufacturer of affordable foot pumps for irrigation. They have a well-developed network of distribution channels to upcountry farmers that NGOs and other government organisations cannot match and won the 2012 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

A third successful enterprise is BusinessKind-Myanmar. The company sells low-cost mosquito netting in malaria and dengue fever regions and half of its workforce is also HIV positive.

A last example is Myanmar Business Executives. This organisation provides low microcredit and networking outlets to needy organisations and individuals.

For-profit business models with social focus

All the above presented initiatives use for-profit business models. They produce a variety of products, have sales strategies, target markets and make a profit that is then mainly redirected to social causes. Some of them also receive grants by international NGOs or aid agencies but rarely in the form of donations. The grants mainly take the form of products that are low-cost necessities accompanied by community-based education.

Many of Myanmar’s social ventures were launched after the Cyclone Nargis in 2008, the biggest natural disaster the country has ever seen. Conventional government and NGO outlets were insufficient to support the hundreds of thousands affected, which motivated charitable individuals and organisations to come up with more innovative relief methods.

Such social initiatives are equally relevant in today’s Myanmar, which is taking rapid steps towards democracy and is experiencing an easing of sanctions by the US and Europe.

In June, Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, partnered with Grameen Shakti, a social business dedicated to providing access to energy, to create a social business joint venture called Grameen Schneider Electric. As a social business, the joint venture will fully reuse profits made by selling access to energy solutions to develop and expand the Grameen Schneider Electric offer throughout Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, there are currently some 1.3 billion people who are still lacking access to energy and Grameen Schneider Electric aims at equipping nearly 200,000 of them with home solar systems by 2013. Schneider Electric has already implemented the solar systems in Nigeria, Senegal, India and Madagascar. In a next step, the venture partners’ teams will collaborate to create innovative and adapted solutions for water pumping or renewable off-grid power generation.

The whole initiative is supported by the Schneider Electric Energy Access Fund. It aims to support the development of entrepreneurial initiatives around access to energy and support the poorest at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It is funded by Schneider Electric, its employees and institutional investors such as the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC) and PhiTrust Active Investors.

“I’d like to clarify Uncharted Play’s business model for the SOCCKET product …  We are a social enterprise, not an NGO; we answer to our investors and are kept afloat by revenue, not donations as your post implies …

For our users in disadvantaged communities, corporations and public institutions underwrite the cost of SOCCKET distribution through bulk/wholesale ball purchases. Users (children) “earn” the balls by participating in the programming of our official NGO partners.

…

Our corporate partners are wonderful, but they are not development institutions. When they were deciding to work with us, they were evaluating whether to put marketing dollars into SOCCKET sponsorship or into another campaign, not another charity.”

So, let’s just be clear about this: Uncharted Play is ‘selling’ the SOCCKET balls, just not to the end users. I.e. they are relying upon a traditional aid model and CSR-style conscience-buying, and then trying to make money out of it. Sounds rather like some big ugly consultancies I know … More to the point their feedback model is as broken as the rest of the aid system. A bottom-of-the-pyramid business proposition this is not.

“Given the distribution of accountability, it would be all too easy for us to simply pay lip service to our social mission while dedicating the bulk of our financial and human resources to sales, marketing, etc.. However … this is not the case: we are truly focused on collaborating with communities to implement meaningful, catalytic programs, and – rather than resting on our laurels or focusing strictly on profit – we are taking aggressive action to engage closely with our partners and participants and track outcomes so that we can drive toward maximal positive impact.”

Really? This reads just like typical drivel from a development agency with negligible impact. What ‘impact’ are they seeking? How many kicks of the ball does it take for a kid to generate enough electricity to power a light while they do one hour’s homework? In fact it looks like the one part of their social enterprise that is doing its job well is the marketing department. So all very reminiscent of the NGO world …

I know plenty of people are very sceptical about the concept of a social enterprise. Uncharted Play unfortunately appears to be a living embodiment of all their arguments that it is just the same old guff dressed up in new clothes. A pity for all the truly enterprising social enterprises out there.

ps. Ms Silverman also claims:

“… kids have found the product to be truly magical. … When we actually say that the ball is special, that it can harness energy and power a lamp or a phone, there is always a collective yell of excitement.  Then, when we plug in a lamp to demonstrate, the kids’ eyes just pop out of their heads, and you can see the wheels beginning to turn.”

Has Ms Silverman considered that this might partly be because the kids have just received the coolest physics lesson of their lives? It would be great if more science lessons could be this inspiring, but I doubt very much it represents value for money for destitute kids.

he Indian social enterprise Villgro, engaged in the incubation and funding of rural social innovations, is about to launch a new project. The company is planning to offer a unique one-year program for social entrepreneurs, who were not successful in their first attempt to launch a social enterprise. Villgro aims at encouraging them not to give up but to give it another shot.

Villgro’s CEO, Paul Basin, explains that “this is not just for people who have ideas. It is for people who have tested their ideas and failed, and who have sufficient learning so that they won’t fail again the second time.”

The new program is called SEED and about launch in September. Until now, Villgro’s business model was to incubate rural-oriented ideas and its financial supporters include the Rockefeller Foundation, le Lemenson Foundation, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and the Technology Development Board.

Villgro is currently in the process of selecting 10 promising social entrepreneurs to support. They will go through three models under the one-year program, which will include training in the fields of offering, pitching to investors and customer insights. To support the entrepreneurs further, they will have three mentors from the business world. These three mentors are PR Ganapathy, Mukesh Sharma and Thomas Pullenkav. PR Ganapathy used to work with India’s leading IT company Infosys Technologies, Mukesh Sharma founded an early stage investment banking firm called Vija Capital and Thomas Pullenkav is a successful sustainable energy consultant.

The goal of SEED is to get the social entrepreneurs ready to raise angel funding by the end of the training. By the end of the one-year program, Villgro also hopes to receive a total funding of $10 million from foundations and investors in the US.

TC-P’s Pakistan’s Top Social Enterprises in 2011 survey found that Naya Jeevan is the country’s top social enterprise. Naya Jeevan is headquartered in Karachi and provides low-income families with affordable access to quality, catastrophic healthcare through their unique micro-insurance program.

The company offers its insurance program in Pakistan at subsidised rates under a novel national group health insurance model underwritten by Allianz-EFU, IGI Insurance and AsiaCare. Naya Jeevan works in collaboration with corporate, academic and non-profit institutions in order to catalyse a wave of social responsibility that can then be leveraged to realise a positive sustainable outcome for all stakeholders.

2011 has been a very successful year for Naya Jeevan as the company was able to quadruple its number of beneficiaries. The total number of beneficiaries currently enrolled in the health plan is 15,300 and clients that came on board in 2011 include:

• Pakistan International Container Terminal Limited
• Alucan Pakistan (Pvt), Alu Pak Pakistan (Pvt)
• Philip Morris
• HRSG Outsourcing
• Philips Pakistan
• CinePax (Box Office)
• FM 91
• Abu Dawood Trading Co, Pakistan
• Indus Pharma
• DHA Services

“Artpreneurs for Change”

Naya Jeevan also launched an initiative called “Artpreneurs for Change” which aims at helping children with disabilities enrol in the Naya Jeeva managed care health plan. The initiative is a collaborative effort between NOWPDP (Network of Organisations Working With People With Disabilities in Pakistan), Fulbright Alumni, Art Therapists and Naya Jeevan itself. Seed funding for the project was given by the US State Department as part of the first ever Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund. The initiative will provide art therapy classes in three schools for children with disabilities and use auction proceeds from the resulting artwork to raise funds and awareness for the healthcare of the affected children.

Take Singapore, for example.  I have been here for 24 hours, attending a conference, and despite so far spending the majority of my time here cooped up in windowless rooms on an (albeit uber plush) university campus, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the brief transition from the bustle of Saigon life to the serene and functional order that is Singapore.

I know, despite this, that I’ll be just as eager to board my plane home on Wednesday, however the intervening hours experiencing this very different aspect of South East Asian life has been novel.

From the moment you board the skytrain at Singapore airport and head into town, you are aware of having been momentarily transported into a different world to that of Saigon.  In fact, although Bangkok boasts an impressive skytrain facility itself, there is no comparison even there in terms of the images you take in as passenger as you skirt round the suburbs of the respective cities.

In Bangkok, I remember only a few weeks back on the journey from the airport, thinking just how absurd it was to see recreational driving ranges – lush green, and populated with hundreds of plastic golf balls – alongside similar sized plots of land, housing cluttered shanty dwellings, with their corrugated iron roofs reflecting back at you in abject irony as another wayward swing from next door rattles into the flimsy green fencing separating rich from poor – from have to have not.

In Singapore, the view from the skytrain could not be any more different in contrast.  High rise buildings followed by parkland followed by more high rise buildings.  Each of them with manicured lawns, pool complexes, and swept pavements.  Even the construction sites in Singapore seem to be orderly and neat in their presentation.  There is no one in Singapore living on less than $2 a day.

I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas (Saigon) anymore: Singapore river

In Saigon, of course, there is hardly a public transport system to acknowledge.  Those buses that do operate are over-crowded and over-heated.  The scooter remains king, doing battle each day with millions of others, as well as the searing heat or – as is the case right now – the sporadic monsoon rains.

In contrast, the skytrains in Bangkok and Singapore are air-conditioned and immaculate in their time keeping.  Their passengers a mix of elderly residents, professional commuters, and young Asian students and teenagers, each plugged into red and blue wired headphones, bent over and tapping away furiously at their various iBranded gadgets.

Saigon will soon catch up with this kind of infrastructure and way of life and, as a city, it stands as a true example of how embracing change, and accelerated growth, has come to epitomise so much of the Asia Pacific region, so dramatically, over the past decade.  Vietnam offers up so many opportunities for this new wave of organisations and donors seeking to remodel how social and environmental development initiatives and sentiment are respectively executed and expressed.

All of which sentiments exuded from today’s first ever “Impact Investment” Asia Forum, in the grounds of Singapore’s National University Campus, and hosted by the Impact Investment Exchange - an innovative organsisation seeking to match up the investor community with a range of social enterprises.  Today, here, the call was clearly made for a new paradigm shift - a convergence of thinking and action that might just meet the global challenges we face.  New sources of capital, new partnerships, more inclusive approaches.

But how signficant might these sentiments really be in the future?  Are they sentiments which could end up merely as convoluted new jargon, or, (and this is what many speakers I listened to today would want you believe) are they sentiments which might, in fact, provide a sustainable solution to some of the world’s problems that were hotly debated about in Rio last week.

Impact investment currently is, for all intents and purposes, a buzz word, and, as was roundly acknowledged here today by many speakers, a nascent movement.  It embodies what is often described as a new “eco-system” of players, in which the aid world, the private sector (in all its guises), academia, individuals, and the public sector all merrily join together in a bid to combine resources, pool ideas and collateral, and create initiatives and partnerships which will solve societal and environmental issues, whilst offering back a positive economic return for those investing in the process.

Google or Wikipedia will ensure that anyone even vaguely interested in this emerging field can find out much more detailed information about this than I can possibly supply.  That is largely due to the learning curve I am on, and the fact that it is currently 1:25am and I have spent the evening drinking wine at tonight’s group dinner (complete with violin solos, a drumming orchestra, a Lauren Hill style Malaysian poetry recital, and a chinese buffet that would have sunk most small vessels.)

My observations from rubbing shoulders with some of the industry’s leading players in this new space, is that the vernacular may be different, and the metrics of how money flows through these newly funded initiatives might differ from traditional modes but, first and foremost, all those organisations, institutions and individuals engaged in impact investing are pretty much indicating similar motives for doing so.  The endgame for all seems aligned as never before.  There is clarity in that, and for me that rings some positive changes from before.

Poverty, within this context, is becoming more mainstream, as a concept and as an issue that effects, and requires responses from, all society.

As consumers of products we are caring much more than ever before about the deal offered to those people who produced our chocolate, our coffee, our furniture, in the first place.  Companies are responding to shareholders, customers, and to their own employees about gearing their supply chains and activities more towards an “inclusive” approach that factors in the needs of others – be they workers, suppliers or small-holder farmers.  Government policies are flexing in a direction that in the future may well accommodate a more directive approach to how large corporations operate in emerging markets.

There is a movement afoot to see these types of changes through.  Whilst the recognition in the room today was that many of society’s successes in helping reform and regulate the private sector have taken decades to come about, the clear message was that the speed of this change is accelerating.

The MBA graduates of 2012 have opinions which matter greatly to future employers, whether they are offering jobs to them or selling to them.  The ways in which technology can now provide instant platforms for people to share their views, their disappointments, (their blogs), is gradually sharpening the tools that each of us have at our discretion to push for change, to advocate.

These are exciting times.  For all that is happening across the world’s financial markets at the moment, for all the many unequal and corrupt transactions that take place everyday in countries which have for too long endured fragmentation in their societies, there is a growing movement of corporations, public policy influencers, NGOs, and individual entrepreneurs who are jumping feet first into this blue water.

As no one yet seems to understand the implications, the architecture of it all, the true meaning of where this is going to end up, it is perhaps – all at the same time -pioneering, bold, misguided and, very possibly, empowering.

And that, for now, is enough to keep me interested in Day 2 tomorrow…

You sense that your purpose is about doing the stuff of God’s Kingdom – the Kingdom that Jesus often talked about and acted out – to give glory to God. For you, Christ is the rightful King. As we’ve just seen in the story of Daniel, God is the victorious, all-powerful King Who is calling His world back to Him – and you’re part of that process.

You see what you do as Kingdom-building whether that’s providing excellent customer service or discovering a cure for cancer or leading the best sales team or changing the lives of children for the better or designing outstanding buildings that will delight and inspire people for decades to come or helping service providers do a better job …

As part of this Kingdom, you are someone who is keen to make disciples because you have taken the Great Commission at the end of the Gospel of Matthew seriously. Discipleship for you means helping people model their lives on Jesus by how you live your life. You are imitating Christ and they are imitating you and so imitating Christ. (In this blog I have suggested a structure and a process for making disciples – a structure and a process we could call ‘church planting’.) You see your colleagues, clients, children, friends, neighbours, fellow church-goers, family members, team mates and house mates as potential disciples, and you want them in turn to be making disciples of their own. You are thinking of ways in which to inspire them to a life like Jesus.

If the above is true for you then I hope this blog is in some way scratching the itch. I will continue to offer suggestions based on Scriptural reading and experience (both past and ongoing) and what I see to be working or could work elsewhere. I am interested in what actually works in our modern society.

One such example is Nat Wei. His story is a fascinating one, worth a bit of study (you can find out more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Wei,_Baron_Wei). I heard him speak at a conference earlier this year, and he had an integrated and perceptive idea of what the church of the future might look like in this country. By integrated I mean that church has the potential to reach every corner of society. As a high-ranking politician, he has a perspective on society that many people do not, and he has dedicated his life to encouraging businesses to invest in social reform. Have a look at the organisations he has set up such as the Shaftesbury Partnership, Community Foundations and Franchising Works. What I am saying here is not about politics; it’s about us as disciples reading the Bible, understanding what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God and responding to it by how we live our lives. Nat is a Christian and I believe he has done something like this.

His work is about helping people start up their own businesses, helping local charities provide a better service to their communities, restructuring communication between different agencies, providing disadvantaged children with better opportunities, influencing disadvantaged sectors of society by bringing together stakeholders, local communities and national partnerships, and building organisations that gear services or products towards social change. He takes his inspiration from nineteenth century social reformers. A lot of this sounds like Kingdom stuff.

What inspired me about his presentation at this conference was his description of how church can happen in the workplace. If church is disciples gathered together, giving glory to Jesus, then it could happen in all kinds of places. Perhaps a few people could get together in a lunch break or before or after work, for example. He had a London-centric view where people commute great distances. (It’s not like this in other parts of the country). They live in one part of London and go one place to work and another for church, but if we are discipling someone at work, they’re getting to know Jesus and things are coming along well, at some point ‘church’ comes up. Where will this person go to church? The most obvious thing is to bring them to your church, but your church is two hours away. Why should this person travel all this way to your church on a Sunday? (It may be that they want to and that’s fine, but this won’t always be the solution). So, ‘church planting’ comes to the fore.

The starting point is always discipleship, then when disciples gather together, they are church. Why shouldn’t church happen where the disciples work and spend most their time? You’re more likely to have more  disciples joining you that way (whether they are new to the faith or have been disciples for a long time). New disciples are often the best at making new disciples.

Being church in the workplace breaks down that sacred-secular divide. After all, discipleship is about the whole life, not just church in a building on Sundays. Church then becomes not just a spiritual activity but a practical one: If I am living a life of discipleship HERE in my workplace, if my church is HERE in my workplace, what does this mean for my work, my colleagues and the business I work for? We can’t so easily separate them out. This could, over time, lead to the culture of your institution changing to be more in line with God’s Kingdom. Institutional change could lead to social change.

Not only do we end up with a lightweight form of multiplying disciples and therefore churches, we have a gathering momentum to effect change in every corner of society. (This is without even mentioning the impact upon a disciple’s home and family life and where they socialise and engage in leisure activities).

Nat Wei also went on to talk about how church can also happen in micro-enterprises, social enterprises and missional houses. Micro-enterprises tend to happen in the developing world but also western countries. They are small business that employ perhaps five or fewer people. They are given a start-up capital which will lead to long-term benefit and sustainability for those workers and their families who were previously unemployed. The enterprise leaders must be of good character and they are held accountable to the business plan. This is a great way to tackle unemployment and a struggling economy, but what a great discipling / church / Kingdom opportunity if the business owner were a discipler!

Social enterprises focus on tackling social problems. They are businesses that reinvest their profits back into the business or the local community. They tend to be set up by entrepreneurs who really want to see change in a particular sector of society: It could be children, people with disabilities, the elderly, homeless people…  Again, if the entrepreneur were a discipler, think of the change in the lives of those who work in their business but also the impact of how they use their money.

Finally, in some deprived inner-city areas around the country, Christians are sharing houses. For example, half the inhabitants of the house will work to finance the other half who volunteer in the local community to bring about Kingdom change. Some might work part-time to fund themselves and spend the rest of their time volunteering.

In each of these examples, a Christ-centred community is at the heart of the work. If we are living a genuine, open life of discipleship then Christ-centred community should develop, and we’ll find ourselves and others making disciples for the glory of God.

What I have outlined above are just some examples of what the future might hold. Clearly, it’s not the only way church can happen, but in a country where church attendance is declining at an alarming rate (where within a generation there might not be a national church to speak of), where Christians are often perceived to be irrelevant to the issues faced by society, where, in many churches, we’ve forgotten what discipleship actually is (or where perhaps it wasn’t really present to begin with), new ways of discipling and church must be considered.

Bangalore based microfinance institution Grameen Financial Services Private Limited, also known as Grameen Koota, has successfully raised INR 25 Crores (USD 5 million) in debt funding through an issue of secured, redeemable non-convertible debentures (NCDs).

The NCDs, which are also listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, will be fully financed through funds advised by responsAbility Social Investments AG (responsAbility), which is one of the world’s leading impact investment companies. This NCD issue is similar to last year’s INR 35 Crores NCD issued by Grameen Financial Services Private Limited.

This transaction is an important milestone for Grameen Koota and will help the microfinance institute improve their liquidity situation and disburse loans to many of the waiting borrowers. Further, the NCD investment from a globally leading impact investment firm is a demonstration of faith on the performance of the company’s commitment to financial inclusion.

Udaya Kumar, CEO, Grameen Financial Services Pvt. Ltd. sais about the transaction social-oriented investors along with greater support from domestic banks and institutions, we will be able to consolidate as an efficient MFI”.

Grameen Financial Services Private Limited currently has about 1,300 employees working out from 168 branches in Tamil Nadi, Maharashtra and Karnataka and assets under management add up to more than US 1 billion.

Kalpna Saroj embodies a rag to riches story like few others. She was born into the Dalit population, a group of people traditionally regarded as untouchable, and faced discrimination from the day she was born. As a Dalit, she was bullied at school, not allowed to participate in some school activities and eventually forced into marriage at 12. With her 10 year older husband she then moved to Mumbai and found herself living in a slum. Even though leaving a marriage is frowned upon in Indian culture, she was able to escape the violent relationship with her husband and her father took her back home. In order to make money, she learnt tailoring and moved back to Mumbai to work as a seamstress, earning less than a dollar a month.

Her entrepreneurial spirit made her take a government loan to open a furniture business and be able to expand her tailoring work. Working 16 long hours a day, her reputation as committed and reliable worker led to her being asked to take over the running of a metal engineering company called Kamani Tubes. Back then it had a lot of debt but by restructuring the company, Ms Saroj was able to turn things around. Kamani Tubes is now a growing business, worth more than $100m. The company employs hundreds of people from all backgrounds and castes.

In 2006, Ms Saroj even won a prestigious award for her social entrepreneurial spirit. Despite her success, she never forgot where she came from and wants to give justice to her employees. As both a Dalit and a woman, her story is significant in a country, where hardly any CEO has the same background as her. She sais that “if you give your heart and soul to your job and never give up, things can happen for you.”

Kelly, is Managing Director of ‘Vi-ability’, a Conwy based social enterprise which transforms football clubs into centres of opportunities & leadership for individuals in their community through education, training & employment.

‘It was a fantastic – once in a life time experience. I’m still overwhelmed now!’ Kelly said, after carrying the torch through Colwyn Bay.

Read Kelly’s nomination story! You can watch Kelly’s leg of the relay, which also involved the torch travelling to the summit of Snowdon and taking a ride on a RNLI Lifeboat.

Impact investing is not available to ordinary Americans.

Social enterprises are companies that have a designed business goal that achieves social good and/or environmental benefits.  Social enterprises are a natural fit for investment by impact investors because the very business models are predicated upon addressing a societal issue and making a broader impact.  It is a great fit.  Here is the problem: ordinary Americans cannot easily participate in many impact investing opportunities.  Social enterprises tend to be smaller companies or project related opportunities as opposed to large public companies and archaic U.S. securities laws make it difficult for those who are not wealthy to learn about or invest in small companies or projects.

Enter the crowdfunding securities exemption.

When the rules are finalized (and keep in mind this is not likely to happen this year), the crowdfunding exemption will allow ordinary Americans to invest into small social enterprises and everyone can elect to become an impact investor.  Want to invest in a solar project in your area to support clean energy?  You will be able to do that.  Interested in supporting a local independent bookstore because you cannot stand another Barnes & Noble?  Invest in the local bookstore.  You decide the impact you want to make.  Everyone will be able to decide the impact that they want to make.  When crowdfunding investment becomes a reality in America, this is going to be a game changer for social enterprises.  Internet portals will develop around specific sectors such as clean energy, local/organic food movements and religious affiliations.   I believe investment clubs will form around these interests.  Crowdfunding, Social Enterprises and Impact Investing will be attached at the hip.  The result will be a dramatic increase in funding for social enterprises.  Many people are focused on how crowdfunding may fund the next Facebook.  That would be great.  I am personally more interested in seeing the cultivation of a garden of social enterprises–not social networks.

Public bodies need to think about their purpose in order to give context to any decision about service provision-e.g. Libraries are more than books, they are also a place-but what is their purpose in the context of your particular public body provision stack?

Social enterprises or traded entities/departments MAY be a solution to the following problems or opportunities:

• Service budget cuts;
• Staff wishing to become external (sooner or later) rather than be made redundant;
• Service users wishing to take more control;
• Market shaping to enable better commissioning or prevent failure;
• Job creation in the local economy through facilitated enterprises.

However, the business MUST ‘make sense’ in its own right AND remember.. Social Enterprises won’t work if forced on staff or users..mutuality CAN’T be enforced. Also some staff won’t want to make this transition-it isn’t what they signed up for.

DON’T forget..‘Other forms of organisation exist’ (e.g. wholly owned subsidiaries of the LA, or joint ventures with other parties). HOWEVER-don’t worry about structures-form should follow function-find out the real business need, outline the philosophy and let the lawyers worry about structure/how to legally form what you need..however…

To be successful, SECs still need the basics-to at least cover ALL costs, and operate in a sustainable way. Issues often overlooked in formation discussions are the following potential show-stoppers either before or after instigation:

• Start-up costs and operating cash flow requirements
• Company systems access (e.g. payroll, finance systems)
• Pensions transfer issues, redundancy cover in the case of potential failure
• Sufficient ‘commercial skills’ within the company and appropriate commercial operating models
• Burdening the company with ‘over provisioned’ policies and procedures copied/pasted directly from an LA parent

If you need a personalised debate and focus within your leadership team around these issues from people that have worked through the entire life cycle from pre-creation through to shut-down of enterprises, contact us for more information.

Social Enterprises and Traded Services-very appealing, but so easy to overlook issues that will cause financial and political problems in the future…

John Ling,

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This article was published originally on my Public Sector Trading Group, which is a blog and service dedicated to supporting colleagues in the public sector to help them make sense of how traded services and spin-out or new social enterprises can help them through making their services more cost effective, relevant, or even just survive in the absence of historic funding streams.

With the current trend to look again at commercialisation, commissioning, marketisation, and market shaping as tools to help respond to public sector spending reviews and cuts, social enterprises and traded services can be a response to that.

Run as a collaboration network between current public sector leadership, third sector leaders and people who have really ‘got the t-shirt’ when it comes to creating ventures like these that work.

Contact us for more information, and to see how we can help you through your challenges of trying to do the best you can for your services and your people.

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www.leadership-support.com is a blog written by John Ling, aimed at leaders in all types of situations and organisations.

My own experience covers Public, Private, Voluntary and Charity Sectors. The Leadership Support learning I’ve had seems to apply equally well across them all. Perhaps that’s because they are all full of people-now there’s the common thread!

This Leadership Support blog is a repository (I like that word, so am leaving it in..) of my experience from the past and present, in the hope that it will help other leaders.

If I have helped you-great! If I can help by having a conversation-please get in touch as I’d love to hear from you.

Whilst of course I am also connected with other organisations from time to time, the views here are absolutely my own.

[English version to follow]

Economía política alternativa: ¿Superar lo corporativo, o superar el capitalismo?

Josean Laguarta Ramírez

Este artículo ha sido publicado anteriormente en La más mínima diferencia y  Bandera Roja (español solamente).  Su contenido refleja el análisis y las opiniones del autor.  El autor es miembro del MST-NYC.

‎Con la fase zombie del capitalismo mundial en pleano apogeo (sus apologetas lo llaman “recesión” y hablan de “recuperación,” pero no pueden decirlo, en privado, sin reírse), los “progresistas” en los Estados Unidos tímidamente argumentan a favor de un “sistema de economía política” alterno, basado en algún tipo de propiedad pública expandida y sujeta a escrutinio democrático.

A esta ecuación le faltan dos elementos, y ambos están relacionados al asunto del poder:

El primero es instituir control obrero y comunitario real y efectivo sobre la producción y distribución. Sin él, solo queda un Keynesianismo ambiguo atrapado en algún lugar entre la social-democracia europea occidental y el “socialismo de mercado” chino – en otras palabras, tan sólo un “sector público” más grande que con lo misma facilidad podría ser recortado (como lo ESTÁ siendo – viciosamente – en Europa en estos momentos) y que al final no necesita realmente mucha “democracia” que digamos (como en China).

El segundo es conseguir una redistribución real de la riqueza y recursos. La idea de que el muy vituperado (pero hasta ahora impune) 1% de alguna manera puede seguir flotando indefinidamente y permitir graciosamente que eche raíces un nuevo “sistema de economía política” si no los arrancamos activamente de las fuentes de su poder en el sistema actual es, por decirlo amablemente, fantaseoso.

No estoy llamando a un retorno a una economía burocrática de mando al estilo Soviético, el cual tenía poco que ver con control obrero o con democracia de cualquier tipo. Lo que sí pienso es que un “sistema de economía política” genuinamente revolucionario requerirá (además de la propiedad pública sólida, socialmente fiscalizada y políticamente comprometida, de los servicios de salud, educación, servicios básicos  - agua, electricidad – industrias estratégicas y grandes bancos) experimentar con y estimular el surgimiento de nuevas empresas productivas y de servicios – y la transición gradual de las existentes – basadas en nuevas formas de propiedad que no sean privadas ni realmente “públicas” (que en última instancia no es más que la propiedad privada del estado), sino sociales y comunales – abiertas a la iniciativa independiente, pero bajo control obrero/comunitario y orientadas no hacia la ganancia y la competencia, sino hacia servir al Pueblo. En la medida que tales formas nuevas puedan florecer y construir redes entre sí que las escuden de las restantes (y, esperemos, decrecientes) presiones de “mercado”, entonces podremos empezar a hablar de un nuevo “sistema de economía política.”

Amigos y oponentes de tales experimentos podrán confundir esta propuesta por un llamado más a favor de alguna especie de híbrido entre socialismo y capitalismo, o entre propiedad pública y privada. No se confundan: esto no es “socialismo de mercado,” simplemente es socialismo no-estatista. Para poder estar protegidas efectivamente del mercado, las nuevas formas de propiedad (y sobre todo la fuerza de trabajo envuelta) deben ser no mercadeables – es decir, no susceptibles a la compraventa.

Imagina redes de empresas sociales basadas en o enlazadas con lugares específicos, que “pertenecen” a sus trabajadorxs, comunidades, ambos o a nadie (no públicas, sino “comunes”) y que legalmente no pueden ser compradas o vendidas. El poder decisional es compartido entre trabajadorxs, comunidades y a veces consumidorxs afectadxs; pueden ser iniciadas independientemente de la burocracia estatal, por una comunidad o grupo de trabajadorxs, “financiadas” mediante créditos públicos (para esta parte, algún tipo de “estado” será necesario, al menos inicialmente); la asignación de recursos estará atada a un sistema policéntrico de planificación participativa que identifique las necesidades de cada comunidad y de la sociedad en general; y pueden extinguirse por decisión de lxs afectadxs, regresando los recursos a la comunidad para usarse en nuevas iniciativas.

Mientras más crezcan los enlaces de las redes, más las empresas sociales dependerán unas de otras (de forma similar a como las corporaciones multinacionales son casi auto-suficientes, en el sentido de que cada subsidiaria fabrica parte del producto final) en lugar de financiación privada (o incluso pública).

Conceptualmente nada de esto es “nuevo” – versiones más o menos embriónicas han existido y existen en diferentes lugares y tiempos.  Pero su concreción depende también de la voluntad política y de las condiciones internacionales capaces de sostenerla (no hay tal cosa como socialismo en un solo país). Con el tiempo, según experimentos similares echen raíz en sociedades vecinas, redes de empresas sociales regionales, continentales e incluso transnacionales emergerían.

Todo esto sería paralelo a lo que quede del sector “privado” tradicional (solo en este sentido podemos hablar de un “híbrido,” al menos inicialmente), en el cual las políticas “estatales” proveerían incentivos y trato preferente a cooperativas y empresas propiedad de trabajadores comunitarias (aún “privadas,” pero que podrán hacer la transición o enchufarse con mayor facilidad al sistema de empresas sociales).

De nuevo, para estar claros, estamos hablando de producción y servicios no-estratégicos. La salud, la educación, los servicios básicos, las industrias estratégicas y los grandes bancos deben ser firmemente públicos – no, más que eso: comunes (nadie es su dueño, por lo que nadie, incluso el estado, puede venderlo) y públicamente administrados y fiscalizados mediante asambleas participativas de trabajadorxs, comunidades y consumidorxs.

También hay que enfatizar que nada de esto puede ocurrir espontáneamente en el capitalismo – tiene que haber una lucha política y ruptura con el estado capitalista. Aclaro esto porque tantxs “progresistas” parecen enamorados con esquemas híbridos de envolvimiento comunitario que no son más que privatización por la cocina (las escuelas “charter” son ejemplo obvio).

Por último, la confianza renovada de lxs progresistas en la “propiedad pública” levanta una pregunta obvia… ¿si lxs derechistas te van a llamar socialista no importa qué, y cada vez menos y menos personas son abiertamente hostiles a la idea del socialismo, entonces porqué no asumir el nombre? A menos, claro está, que la intención sea tan solo superar el capitalismo “corporativo,” y no el capitalismo como tal.

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‎Alternative Political Economies: Beyond Corporate, or Beyond Capitalist?

Josean Laguarta Ramírez

This article has been previously published in La más mínima diferencia y  Bandera Roja (Spanish only).  Its content reflects the analysis and opinions of the author.  The author is a member of the MST-NYC.

With the walking dead phase of world capitalism in high gear (apologists for the system call it a “recession” and make claims of “recovery,” but they can’t say it in private with a straight face), “progressives” in the United States are timidly making the case for an alternate “system of political economy,” based on some kind of expanded, democratically accountable public ownership.

Two things are missing from this equation, and both are related to the question of power:

The first is instituting real, effective worker and community control over production and distribution. without it, all you get is a vague Keynesianism somewhere between Western European social democracy and Chinese “market socialism” – in other words, just a bigger “public sector” that can just as easily be rolled back again in the future (as it IS being rolled back – viciously – in Europe at the moment) and that in the end doesn’t really need much “democracy” at all (as in China).

The second is achieving real redistribution of wealth and resources. The idea that the much-vituperated (but as of yet untouched) 1% will somehow float along indefinitely and graciously allow a new “system of political economy” to take hold if we don’t actively uproot them from the sources of their power in the current system is, to be gentle, a fantasy.

I’m not arguing for a return to a Soviet-style bureaucratic command economy, which had little to do with worker control or democracy of any kind. What i do think is that a genuinely revolutionary “system of political economy,” would require (in addition to solid, socially monitored, and politically-committed public ownership and worker/community management of healthcare, education, basic utilities, strategic industries, and the big banks) experimenting with and stimulate the emergence of new productive and service enterprises – and the gradual transition of existing ones – based on new forms of property that are not private and not really “public” (which in the end is nothing more than private property by the state), but rather social and communal – open to independent initiative, but worker/community controlled and geared not towards profit and competition, but towards serving the People. To the degree that such new forms can flourish and build networks amongst themselves that shield them from remaining (and hopefully dwindling) “market” pressures, then we can begin to talk about a new “system of political economy.”

Friends and foes of such experiments may confuse this proposal for yet another appeal for some kind of hybrid between socialism and capitalism, or public and private ownership. Make no mistake: this is not “market socialism”, just non-statist socialism. In order to be effectively shielded from the market, new forms of property (and particularly the labor involved) need to be non-commodifiable – that is, not susceptible to sale or purchase.

Imagine networks of place-based or place-linked social enterprises that “belong” to their workers, their communities, both, or to no one (not public, but “common”) and legally can’t be bought or sold. Decision-making is shared by “stake-holding” workers, communities and sometimes consumers; they can be initiated independently of state bureaucracy, by the community or by a group of workers, “funded” through public credits (for this part, some kind of “state” will be needed, at least initially); resource allocation will be linked to a system of polycentric participatory planning that identifies the needs of each community and the polity at large; and they can be shut down by decision of the “stakeholders”, with assets returning to the community for new initiatives.

The more the linkages in the network grow, the more the social enterprises will depend on each other (much in the way many multinational corporations are nearly self-sufficient, in the sense that each subsidiary makes one part of the finished product) rather than private (or even public) financing.

Conceptually, none of this is “new” – more or less embryonic versions have existed and exist at different times and places.  But its realization also depends on political will, and the international conditions to sustain it (no such thing as socialism in one country). Over time, with similar experiments taking hold in neighboring polities, regional, continental, and transnational social enterprise networks would emerge.

This would all be parallel to whatever remains of the traditional “private” sector (only in this sense can we speak of a “hybrid”, at least initially), where “state” policy would provide incentives and preferential treatment for community-based coops and worker-owned companies (still “private”, but can transition/plug into the social enterprise system more easily).

Again, to be clear, we’re talking about non-strategic production and services. Healthcare, education, basic utilities, strategic industries, and the big banks should be squarely public – no, more than that: common (no one owns it, so no one, not even the state, can sell it), and publicly managed and overseen through participatory stakeholder assemblies.

Also, none of this can happen spontaneously within capitalism – there needs to be political struggle and rupture with the capitalist state. I clarify this because so many “progressives” seem enamored with so-called hybrid community-involvement schemes that are nothing more than backdoors to privatization (“charter” schools being a case in point).

Finally, progressives’ renewed confidence in “public ownership” begs the question…  if right-wingers are going to “call you a socialist no matter what,” and less and less people are openly hostile to the idea of socialism, then why not embrace it? Unless, of course, the intention is simply to go beyond “corporate” capitalism, not capitalism itself.

India’s literacy ranks 147 out of 177 countries surveyed by the UNESCO. Many of the hundreds of millions of illiterate people are even neo-literates, which means that they only possess rudimentary literacy skills despite having attended several years of primary school education. This phenomenon exists because many primary school students do not grow up in environments that are conductive to increasing their literacy. The result of this is that every year, an estimated 27 million Indian children complete primary school with non-functional literacy levels.

In order to fight this, social entrepreneur Kothari Brij launched PlanetRead, which won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2002 and was honoured at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative meeting. PlanetRead believes that literacy skills must be constantly reinforced in order to avoid regression toward illiteracy. In order to do that, the organization found Same Language subtitling (SLS) an effective tool.

The effectiveness of SLS is further supported by research studies conducted by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the Nielsen-ORG Center for Social Research. They found that when exposed to 30 mins SLS per week, the functional literacy rate among students who had at least five years of Hindi in their schooling history grew from 25% to 56%.

Currently the organization applies SLS to eight major programmes in a major Indian language. The programmes have a weekly airtime of 30 minutes and reach 200 million neo-literate viewers. The organization was also able to convince Indian policy-makers of the value of SLS, which will hopefully accelerate the adoption of SLS within India, with the vision to expand efforts internationally.

What the hell has a tub of ice cream got to do with building a successful consulting and change management business? The answer is: quite a lot, actually.

I am often asked if I’m a bit barmy. Previously I’ve written of my motivation for starting The Different Company http://thetippingpoint.me/2012/02/08/and-now-for-something-completely-different/ yet many people still don’t seem to get it.

“Introducing Socialism into Management Consulting” was one such bizarre comment. Socialism? Really? By raising funds and help for philanthropic causes? The philanthropic Tories of the 19^th century would have taken issue with that rather silly jab.

Some others don’t think the business can be sustainable. Well, I think quite the opposite is true – we are growing and will continue to grow because of what we give. Supporting our theory, my wife Vanessa came across the following article by Jon Carson which really nails it. Have a read and think what you can do in your business to get that competitive edge. Maybe working with The Different Company to successfully deliver some of your projects – and at the same time helping philanthropic efforts – might be a good start?

Creating an Edge With Mission: Competitive Advantages of For-Profit Social Enterprises

One of the least talked about aspects of for-profit social enterprise is the competitive advantages it confers to those who do it well. Once thought of as naïve, the for-profit social enterprise model is an effective way to compete in today’s competitive business climate. It presents tangible advantages around attracting and retaining human capital, brand equity, and customer loyalty to name just a few.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as hopeful and altruistic as the next guy. But the practical reality is that the more value CEOs see in being a sustainable and social enterprise, the more companies and organisations of all kinds will fully embrace it.

Born From Authenticity: For these models to work well they really do need to be born from the authentic view of the founder, the CEO, and the management team around being a positive contributor to society.

This must not be a side purpose but the core underlying purpose of which the product or service is the means to fulfil that mission. If the social mission is just window dressing and not backed up with behaviour, it will likely attract cynical employees and create a toxic culture ripe for implosion.

Practicality Breeds Profitability: No venture ever really fulfils its mission until it becomes sustainable and this means driving to profitability. Profitability generates capital for further investments. It says that you have a model that can work over the long term.

Being practical means that there is a mix of deeply felt passion for the greater good with the near term focus on getting to the next level of being sustainable.

The Human Talent Advantage: One of the biggest advantages to enterprises with a social purpose is the ability to attract and retain superior human capital through good times and bad.

Purpose (along with mastery and autonomy) is a core primary human need. Companies who imbue their workforces with a deeply felt purpose beyond a pay cheque tend to attract committed, loyal, and well-rounded employees. When the culture is strong, healthy, and full of purpose retention rates soar.

Would you rather work for a soulless, data centre optimization venture, or a firm that is working on a big idea for sustainability?

Brand Positioning: I have also found that brand equity builds faster and deeper when there is a deeply-felt purpose by employees and customers to the company’s mission. Customers will identify you in favourable ways and loyalty will be long and deep, as will brand recall.

On the media front, many reporters will give you the benefit of the doubt and favourable positioning, although one might argue that reporters ought to push harder on how authentic many ‘CSR-minded’ companies truly are.

Investor Advantages: Social enterprises may receive slightly more patience and buy-in from investors, especially if they themselves are mission driven.

This is not a free pass but in most companies there is a point in time where things can go either way. If investors pull the plug they go one way, if they stay in the game things can often break the other way.

However, these advantages come over time. Investors generally want to make sure you are there to make them money (you are). When pitching investors, it can be highly risky to focus too much on mission issues out of the gate.

Alliances: I have found over time that many companies want to build their brand equity by partnering with those that already have it.

Alliances are in large part built on trust and trust is a commodity that is easier to come by if you stand for something. In essence, if your brand has a strong social responsibility core, stands for values that are broadly embraced, has a strong following of customers, and gets positive press you may find alliance partners easier to come by.

The Punchline: The fact remains that mission-driven companies working on big problems tend to build early customer loyalty, employee commitment, receive favourable press, and have growing brand recognition scores.

The long and short of it all is that corporate social responsibility can and should go far beyond just the mission. It needs to be factored in employee screening, customer treatment, alliances, and media relations.

Provided it is authentic, social enterprise is an effective edge to compete. You don’t have to look further than the food category to see any number of leading brands that have clearly positioned themselves as standing for more than something to eat.

Anybody for some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream?

Contrary to popular belief I am the MOST social person ever. I hate attending social gatherings. I don’t like visiting friends or family. Talking on the phone is torture. Even when I do meet people I am extremely awkward and do and say crazy stuff. People make me nervous. That’s why I love social media. I can stay in touch with everyone who matters and everyone who doesn’t matter at all but like to think otherwise.

But since May last year I have been pushing myself to go out there and meet people because it’s important for business. And people at the end of the day are just that, people. Humans! Which means, they are “humane” as well. Compassionate.

Sadly, I have started feeling like no one cares. I may be wrong of course but I don’t hear anyone talk about helping others. If you dare to do that they look at you like that kid in junior school who talks about becoming a doctor to help the ailing humanity. Stupid! Naive! Dumb! Value proposition means saving big bucks in the most innovative way. My biggest competitors are sitting in India and Philippines so I am asked, “We can get the same services at the same rates at the same quality from Gurgaon. Why you?” And I naively say, “Because WDL is a social enterprise. We do everything they can do for you but we also bring you personal gratification.” *Roll on Floor Laughing* right? No one cares. Maybe if I said, “They are doing it for $1/hr. I’ll do it for $0.50 which means these young women in some remote village will barely make enough to buy groceries but  hey, you’ll save a tiny bit more for serving fancier wine at that dinner party for 50 you have been planning for 2 weeks now“. Now THAT will bring in the work, eh?

Also, I have meet “social entrepreneurs”. Online of course. You know what the common thread is? Marketing! Marketing black and yellow faces to white ones. Posting big website banners with smiling photos of people in non-western clothes sitting in front of computers saying to the world, “Look, I am the new monkey specie in the zoo … see how I can hold a banana and eat it almost like you would.“

Here is what someone I have been following for a long time had to say on the whole social entrepreneurship thing:

To start, i have had a problem with the frame of “social entrepreneurship” as it is generally an elitist frame. “Cultural entrepreneurship” would seem to dig the hole deeper…. Who but the privileged? Do we not as humans all want to make a positive impact with our efforts? Lots of my colleagues living on less than $5 a day make a difference in their community with their enterprise, but wouldn’t be seen in this priviledged air. As this term has gained currency from funders, I find myself grudgingly in a growing market established itself around this “social entrepreneurship” frame. Secondly, as a change agent and an academic trained in cultural anthropology, the frame of “cultural entrepreneurship” as an innovation newly born in the context of capitalism is so disconnected from the many bodies of good work by practitioners in applied social sciences, that I don’t even want to get started.

Elitist! Feeding on others misery. Making money off it. Asking for their stories so they can manipulate them and do business. Make the next million for the VC breathing down their necks for return. If this is how I wanted to sell - telling sob-stories about my team – I’d be well on my way to making it into the Big League. BUT I AM NOT SELLING ANYONE’S DIGNITY FOR DOING BUSINESS! This is the whole idea behind WDL. Hire us because we are good at what we do. Not because of issues in our personal lives that you can milk for your next CSR campaign.

My way may not be the way taught by professors in universities. My way may also not be the fastest way. But I’ll get there and will keep my humanity intact as well.

For now, I go back to listening to soppy 80s songs and picking up online fights with random people over nothing.

CSV VOCAL is a volunteering scheme that enables people with learning difficulties to become volunteers in their own communities.  It has the following aims:

o Enable people to integrate into and contribute to their own community through volunteering

o Enable people to be the givers rather than the receivers of care

o Enable people to access training in order to develop skills to enable them to volunteer in their own communities and to become as independent as possible

o Reduce dependency on services specifically set up to support people with learning difficulties (including CSV)

o To develop volunteering roles of genuine benefit to the local community

To maximize integration, CSV recruits local people to act as Support Volunteers.  The Support Volunteers work with those people unable to volunteer without support.  They assist with training and have a general befriending role, to give potential volunteers the skills and confidence they need to become volunteers themselves.

Opportunities are tailored to the needs of the individual.  Volunteers work in local playgroups, schools, elderly people’s homes, shops, Community Transport projects, conservation groups, and a farm and museum.  They grow vegetables on allotments, and support local disabled and elderly people by gardening, socialising, and helping with basic chores and shopping.

This project is part of CSV the UK’s largest volunteering and training charity, and has operated in Norfolk for 22 years.  A sister scheme in Norfolk is the Norfolk Knitters, running knitting groups across the County (Knit and Natter), including a community base in Norwich, and selling or donating what is produced for charitable purposes.

For more information on Norfolk Knitters contact Linda at lindame278@btinternet.com (or visit our local (Diss) Library, where this scheme is already operating.)

CSV are hoping to start running similar schemes in both South Norfolk and North Norfolk, - so watch out for Press Releases, or you can always send a message via me or my blog, or make contact direct with Helen or Yvonne on 01366 385839 at their Downham office.

Hawker centres in Singapore are very popular places to get inexpensive food. As food costs are rising, the Government of Singapore announced in October 2011 that it will build 10 new hawker centres in currently underserved areas over the next 10 years to ensure that everyone has access to affordable food. The vision is to offer a variety of affordable delicacies, with community spaces or amenities such as childcare centres, where parents can drop their children off, grab a bite and head to work. Also, minimum bids for stalls will be removed which will significantly decrease rental prices for hawker stalls.

A first step towards the creation of new hawker centres was the formation of the Public Consultation Panel on Hawker Centres, comprising 18 representatives from different social enterprises and industries. The panel had to supposed to come up with ideas to ensure affordable food prices in the future. In the final recommentation report, the panel suggests to get social enterprises to run hawker centres in order to:

1. Allow the community to derive maximum benefit from the centres
2. Ensure that the centres serve as employment opportunities, especially for low income groups and less privileged
3. Provide a platform for individuals who aspire to be part of the food industry

At a press conference, Social Enterprise Association executive director Teo Mee Hong, who is on the panel, explained the concept of the hawker social enterprise: “It is a registered non-profit company that rents out hawker stalls to create viable livelihoods for small time individual hawkers, the low income and the less privileged locals to provide affordable food to the community.”

In the last few years, rental rates increased as the practice of subletting stalls among hawkers became common. The first of those hawker centres is to be built at Bukit Panjang and and will be run by a social enterprise or cooperative. The Government is expected to decide on one by early next month.

Download the panel’s recommendation report here >>

A little-known low-tech phone technology allows images to be sent as bitmaps in text messages. This technology opens up the world of applications to the bottom billion and allows them to participate in crowdsourcing tasks.

Experts agree that when it comes to mobile communications, there is still a lot of room for innovation in the world’s poorest areas. In Bangalore, researchers from the University of Toronto and Microsoft are currently developing a new business model for phone owners by adapting a protocol that can receive pictures as bitmapped text messages. This technology could readily be used in the roughly 1.5 billion low-end phones in circulation.

The technology is supposed to be used to crowdsource the task of digitizing handwritten documents word by word. It’s an easy task that could then be done by anyone that owns a low-end phone. The model of phone-sourcing has the potential to provide substantial income for people at the bottom of the pyramid.

In a 5-week pilot test in Kannada, a region four hours from Bangalore, 239 users completed 64,000 tasks, for a total of 25,000 digitized words in a handwritten document that had been chopped into thousands of images of individual words.

The usage of displaying images on text messages could also be the starting point for several future innovations, ranging from simple games to educational tasks.

For more information, click here >>

As fan-owned Bayern Munich prepare for another Champions League final, we ask if clubs are suited to this ownership model

What’s the point of a football club? If we look at the motives of its owners, we’d get some strange answers. It could be a millionaire’s pension fund, a property development opportunity, a shot at a capital gain, a millstone, a tax dodge, an ego-trip, a nest-egg, a birthday present, a promotional tool, a political tool; the list is far from exhaustive.

No club was ever founded with this in mind, of course. They began life as genuine clubs, open to membership from the community of players, and later supporters, who had an interest in their success.

But over time – mainly for the need to raise capital to build stadia – clubs became companies, and lots of members gave way to a smaller number of shareholders. They coalesced over time and soon clubs were dominated by a small handful of people, most eventually becoming the private property of a single person.

This seems at odds with the true nature of the enterprise, which has an inherently public character. Football’s magic is to take all the emotions that define what a club means to one fan and make it equate to those of every one of the hundreds, thousands or millions of people who share the same allegiance. Football serves a deep human need for community, and that – plus the unscripted drama of the game – explains its success. We love our clubs because of what they are, not for what they do for their owners or employees.

That’s why a co-operative form is a perfect fit with football, because in a co-op economics flow from purp ose, not the other way around. In Europe, co-operative and mutual ownership is commonplace, with almost a quarter of the top-flight clubs in UEFA’s 53 member countries being owned and run this way. When Bayern Munich play in the Champions League final in 10 days’ time, they will make it the 14th final in the past 21 years to feature a fan-owned and run club.

Here, though, the battle to bring the values and virtues of co-operatives to bear only really began in the past decade, starting in earnest with the formation of Supporters Direct in 2000.

The supporters co-operatives they set up have been slowly building their influence and now own the controlling stake in 25 clubs. The highest-placed is Brentford in League one. Sixteen more have a minority stake greater than 10%, while a fan is elected onto the board to represent fans at 46 clubs; Swansea City in the Premiership is the highest prof ile, with their fans co-operative owning 20% of the club and having lifelong fan Huw Cooze on the Board.

Swansea’s success illustrates a problem facing supporters’ co-ops; that they tend to make gains when clubs are in crisis. When the previous owners ran Swansea into the ground, fans got their break and purchased it alongside four local businessmen for a fraction of what it is now worth, because no one else was interested. All those other motives – pension fund, development and the rest – fade away, leaving only love and loyalty to drive prospective owners of last resort.

Where the club isn’t in crisis (football’s version of rude health), fans struggle to get the required liquidity quickly enough to beat rivals when existing owners look to sell up.

As a result, most experiences of fan ownership begin with a monkey on the club’s back. Where they takeover, they do so with inherited d ebt. Where they form a new team to replace a liquidated predecessor (such as at Scarborough Athletic), they often start minus a ground, which will have been lost in the collapse of the old club.

But to see what can be done if a club can get past the problems, just look at Exeter City. Fans took on debts of £1m, but instead of labouring for years to pay them off, they drew Manchester United in the FA Cup and with their share of the attendance money, wiped those debts out in a stroke.

They’ve had the chance to build, rather than just deal with the mistakes of the past, and have seen the club achieve two of the five promotions in its history, finish as high as they ever have up the footballing pyramid and are enjoying a 60% increase in attendance. These are the good old days for the club.

But they also embody the biggest problem supporter co-operat ives face. Like all co-operatives, they must be profitable, since their only source of revenue and capital is their members. This marks them out as oddities in the world of football, where clubs are run as extensions of their owners’ interests and underwritten by their private wealth; making a surplus is a nice idea, but one rarely achieved.

This is particularly ironic given the way the existing powers view fan involvement in clubs. I’ve been in offices in the Premier League and Football League, where executives have cartoons on the wall showing how “unreasonable” fans are: speech bubbles from the terraces call for all the best players in the world to be signed with scant consideration for the financial implications.

It was a point made in more formal ways than cartoons. Many chairmen told Supporters Direct that fan involvement would lead to financial catastrophe. Coming from people in charge of a sector in which more than 50% of its professional bu siness have become insolvent since 1992, this is more than a little hypocritical.

But the ruinous economics they have presided over is rigged against people who want to be sane and sustainable, like supporters co-operatives must be. Players’ wages bear less relationship to what the clubs employing them can actually afford on their own generated trading income, and rely instead on subsidies from their wealthy owners.

In other co-operatives, seeing other businesses act stupidly is good news, for virtue has its own reward. Not so in football, where sitting out the madness isn’t an option. That isn’t from unreasonable fans demanding success but from them being disenchanted with the idea that a weaker squad’s outcome for the season is already decided before a ball has been kicked.

For many of the clubs where fans call the shots, this isn’t a problem – yet – as they play in the lower leagues of the football pyramid where their larger fanb ase more than compensates, but the ultimate success of fan co-operatives depends on the game being made safe for people who think it’s a good idea that clubs don’t lose money hand over fist.

After years of opposing any regulations to help bring this about, there’s been a sea change in attitudes, as UEFA’s imposition of such rules has demonstrated the power of regulatory bodies to act. That, combined with the size of debts in the midst of a recession, has concentrated minds, and across all four divisions there are measures in

place to bring costs under control. These new rules still have many loopholes, and there is a real issue that the changes won’t come about quickly enough for co-operative clubs, whose ability to keep pace by generating new income from members is more constrained in a recession.

To really change the face of football will take more than waiting for basket cases to finally come into fan ownership. Their commitment to openness , sustainability and community engagement should compel more active support from the game’s authorities. However, their position of “ownership neutrality” is in reality to be against it, given the impediments it faces. Real support will be needed from government.

The coalition government took office with a pledge to “encourage co-operative ownership of clubs by supporters”, and for a time there were encouraging signs that there might be genuine progress. The DCMS select committee published a report endorsing, amongst other things, fan involvement in clubs and on boards. Yet despite initially agreeing with the report, the government then pronounced itself satisfied with a response from the game’s governing powers that pretty much ignored all of these ideas.

Politicians have been comfortable with willing the ends of fan ownership, but if it is to re ally take root in the UK, like in so many areas, they need to will the means, even if that means going beyond their generation-long stance of non-intervention in the economic sphere.

In the meantime, the biggest hope comes from the community shares scheme used by FC United of Manchester. The club, formed by fans of Manchester United disgruntled not just at the Glazer takeover, which saw their loyalty “monetised” to pay for the leveraged buyout by their absentee owners.

Underpinning the club was a new vision of what the point of a football club was, one much more in keeping with the founding ethos of the game and the community basis of clubs.

They were successful in raising £1.6m from 1,400 fans, an impressive feat at any time, not least in the current economic climate. While their success is built on years of engagement with fans, which many fans’ co-operatives need to emulate, it does hol d out an intriguing and co-operative outcome.

Having been subject to flirtations with the stock exchange and securitisation, football clubs are now in a position where serious investors know they will lose some or all of their money. Banks had come to the same judgment years ago, with football being one of the few areas in the years leading up to the crash where they seemed to show restraint in who they lent to.

The main sources of capital – or revenue subsidy as it is in most cases – is wealthy individuals. But for every top-flight club on the verge of global exposure through the Champions League who might have many suitors, there are so many more who will appeal only to their fans.

It’s been said that every revolution is the act of kicking in a door that’s already rotten. If fan co-operatives can get their act together, and raise their capital together, fan co-operatives might find the door offers even less resistance.

Dave Boyle has worked for the past 10 years in the supporters’ trust movement and is now considered an expert in membership issues, fan culture and the politics and economics of sport. He tweets at @theboyler.

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