What makes a good social enterprise team

In this video, social entrepreneurs discuss how social enterprises can be a vibrant and exciting environment to work in, and the importance of team work, trust and solidarity. There’s a tremendous social value in working here and everybody who works here, is here because they love the mission. If they didn’t love the mission they wouldn’t be here. Most of these are staff, our staff are very professional, very capable, very skilled. They could probably make more money if they wanted to work somewhere else, if that was all they cared about. But they don’t.

They love what we do, and they love the kind of organisation we are, and they find it very fulfilling to work here and know that their skills are going towards helping people in a way they care about, and the same is true of our donors, both our financial donors and our food donors. I think what the essence of our service is, and it’s all about the passenger experience on our bus, and for that to happen, you know it needs to be a personal service. The drivers, they need to be treated like human beings in the workplace and then they can treat their passengers like human beings on the bus. And that’s what it’s all about, really.

If the driver just feels like a number, then the passenger just feels like a number and no one wants to feel like a number.

Circus is an art of perfection, you’re never happy. It’s really, really, really hard work, a lot of determination, a lot of discipline. So, the life is good, but is hard. It’s pretty aesthetic. What’s great about circus is that circus itself, the learning of circus, it’s really fun. The other one is that it’s inspirational and it is aspirational as an art form, to perform it or to watch it, as you see with the publics. And an other one is that those very basic things you learn like solidarity, trust that when I jump someone is going to catch me, trust myself and trust the others to look after me.

Collaboration, cooperation, these are vital things to make a show happen and they are just basic circus requirements, basic values that really feed into other areas of their lives. Right now we are like a family because we spend more time together working and travelling, than we spend with our own families. We laugh, we cry, we fight. We argue a lot in order to improve our performance. We are upset for five minutes and then we make friends again and that is the best.