Key Elements of a Federal Government Social Enterprise Strategy
At its core, social enterprise embodies two elements: the passion for addressing social challenges and the generation of market-based revenues in support of that social purpose. Regardless of whether the social enterprise is an individual or an organization, regardless of their choice of incorporation – non-profit or for-profit, these two elements are the driving force.
Those two elements aren’t just identifiers. It is the conjunction of those two elements, bringing together the power markets and social purpose, which is at the heart of the incredible promise of social enterprise. While it has always been assumed that business activity produces an indirect benefit to its community (e.g. through employment and tax revenue), social enterprise brings the power of ‘social’ more deeply into the business world, daring to ask what profits could be made and advances could be achieved if businesses embedded in their value propositions a commitment to directly solve the world’s biggest and most perplexing social challenges. For social organizations, social enterprise brings the power of markets to make them more financially sustainable and take their social impact to the next level.