SEEB Themes (2/3) — Bridging To The Future

Back to Part 1.

SEEB (Social Entrepreneurs, Social Enterprises and Social Businesses) behave like normal businesses and enterprises but crucially reinvest into the community through innovative solutions to local needs.
Any SEEB has six core themes:

1. using business techniques to find creative and workable solutions to social problems;
2. maximising improvements in human and environmental well-being by applying commercial strategies;
3. creating and designing new solutions, ways of working and ideas to address social problems;
4. re-establishing community based solutions with community based economies;
5. grassroots socio-economic communities being the foundation of the economic and social sustainability of cities and regions; and
6. moving away from large corporate entities towards more local supply in order to meet local need through reinvestment of profits into the community rather than wealthy corporate shareholders.

A social economy is a fair and ethical market system. This is not the public sector, nor the full free market sector, but a ‘third way’. As explained previously, a social business supports ethical trading, fair wages, strong values and using their profit to deliver social good. Social entrepreneurism pairs with social innovation to create/invent/design new ideas, businesses, approached and solutions to local/regional/national needs. Finally a social enterprise acts much like a social business, perhaps with some funding from the state or interested charities.

We like to reiterate, social businesses still act primarily as a business. This means that they create real jobs, deliver social good and improve peoples’ lives through selling their products or giving them employment.
However, it becomes much more than this; SEEBs can use their profit to work with drug addicts, offer jobs to illiterate women so that they can be taught how to read and write while at the same time becoming economically independent, pay for shelters for homeless LBGT young people, offer fresh meals for the elderly and disabled within their own home, or develop the employability of young people by employing them so that they can learn about work in a practical way whilst not having the economic disadvantage of an apprenticeship.

This is the social good which makes these entities a SEEB.

Read on in Part 3.

DT