The role of government in social enterprise

Governments around the world have taken steps to support and encourage social enterprises. For example, the Ecuadorian government gave a central role to play for these organizations, in its 2008 constitution. In this video, we invite Professor Fergus to talk about the role of the UK government, in supporting the social enterprise sector. Here is what he says. In the UK, the particular policies that have been, first of all you could say there’s a trying to encourage of social enterprise and this is just giving the support, online resources, supporting a social enterprise UK umbrella body. There’s regional social enterprise bodies in each region of the UK, to try and encourage more social enterprise.

Then there’s also been programs in schools, trying to get school children to start up their own social enterprise, when they are doing business programs. You know, why not? Rather doing a conventional business do a social enterprise. And some great examples of children selling water, and using that money to fund back into social programs just through bottle water sales or cake sales, all shorts of activities. So that’s one, that’s the cultural side. The other thing that helped start up is getting the legislation right.

And in the UK there’s been a whole range of different types of social enterprise, over the last 15 years, a new legal form has emerged, the Community Interest Company, which is designed to make it much more easy for social enterprises, to not only demonstrate that they have a social value in this community interest, or they got more charitable aims, but so are their businesses as well. But also, there’s one-to-one advice.

So we have programs that have been supported by the government, like in the past the School for Social Entrepreneurs, and other shorts of advisory services were funded by the government, much less so now as we’re going through a period of austerity and the change of government has been much less activity there.