As I’ve been reading Mission Inc. I begun to ponder how we find thing that is ‘our calling’. The week before last I was speaking at a residential weekend that was looking at just that topic – 20 people came together to think about what their calling might be. It was an amazing weekend.

If we can spend our time living out our calling in life, addressing those issues that make up our ‘spiritual discontent’ and using our talents and strengths to do it then we will be the most fulfilled, exhilarated and happy individuals on the planet. That’s certainly the place I want to live my life!

In the last post What brings you to social enterprise? I was talking about how our own personal journeys often create the direction of our calling. For Kevin Lynch it was drug and alcohol addiction for Julius Wall Jr. it was:

“a combination of business, priesthood, leadership and advocacy”.

For me it’s about empowering others to reach their potential and I’m at my happiest, my most effective and my most fulfilled when I’m able to work towards achieving this.

As much as our own personal journeys have influenced the direction of our calling our ‘Spiritual Discontent’ has fuelled the fire.

What is Spiritual Discontent?

“fueling the fire that ignites your personal vision”

Spritual Discontent is the idea that we each an issues that when we are confronted with it a passion rises up inside of us and we long for a society where that issue is resolved. It’s that in society that we see and that we just can’t stand seeing.

For me its seeing people unable to achieve their potential because they are under-resourced or held back by a lack of knowledge or emotional issues that remain un-addressed. That is my Spiritual Discontent.

For the astute of you you may be feeling you’ve heard some of this before. This post is a result of my thinking around the topics of Holy Discontent (Bill Hybel’s thinking around this is the most developed) and Brian Draper’s work on Spiritual Intelligence (being aware of the spiritual realms of our being in the way that we are now aware of our Emotional Intelligence after Daniel Golman’s work).

How do you discover your Spiritual Discontent?

Consider the following questions.

• I am passionate about …
• When I look at society I can’t stand to see …
• I truly think it’s unacceptable when …
• I can’t imagine that it is right that …
• I don’t want to live in a world where …
• I will not stand by and watch the unfolding of …
• I feel most satisfied and fulfilled when I’m focused on …
• The most heart-wrenching experiences I’ve endured include …
• There are certain experiences that always seem to increase my energy for living …
• Certain people have the same effect; they tend to be …
• If I could make a difference in one aspect of the world knowing that I could not fail it would be …
• It might seem silly or insignificant, but one world-changing dream I’ve always seemed to carry is to …

[adapted from My Holy Discontent]

Once you’ve begun to identify your holy discontent the next step is to consider how your unique talents and strengths can enable you to have a real impact in your community. More on that another time.

Books to Read

Mission, Inc.: The Practitioners Guide to Social Enterprise by Kevin Lynch & Julius Walls Jr.

Holy Discontent: Fueling the Fire That Ignites Personal Vision by Bill Hybels

Spiritual Intelligence by Brian Draper

]]> http://formorethanprofit.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/your-spiritual-discontent/feed/ 0 Bev African children 51Nim2TrQFL._SL160_ 21aaGXKOSXL._SL160_ 41DeT1KCxbL._SL160_ http://formorethanprofit.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/what-brings-you-to-social-enterprise/ http://formorethanprofit.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/what-brings-you-to-social-enterprise/#comments Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:28:27 +0000 Bev Meldrum http://formorethanprofit.wordpress.com/?p=217 ]]>

“What Brings You Here’ is is the question posed at the beginning of Kevin Lynch & Julius Walls, Jr.’s book Mission Inc: The Practioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise which I’m currently reading.

The two authors then summarise their own journeys and how they ended up running social enterprises.

Kevin Lynch was also an entrepreneur from the early days of sub-contracting out his newspaper delivery job to his sister’s for a lower wage than he was getting to set up his own ad agency. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for a number of years during that time.

Kevin talks of the spiritual reawakening he had as he went through the Twelve Step recovery programme as part of Alcoholics Anonymous as being coupled with a social reawakening as he realised the corruptness of industry he was in.

Without spoiling too much of the story he was introduced to the Social Venture Network in the US, focused his work in the ad agency on the social sector and then made a move to Rebuild Resources. Rebuild Resources works with addicts and alcoholics giving them jobs in the businesses they run.

The other author, Julius Wall Jr, work in a chocolate factory in Brooklyn, New York for 12 years where he ended up in a management position – it was unusual at the time for an African-American to have such an opportunity. He left to set up his own chocolate company, spent time training as a priest and then ended up volunteering at Greyston Bakery. He stayed on at the organisation working as a consultant and then Director of Operations. He is currently serving as CEO and President of the Greyston Foundation.

He describes his work today as:

“a combination of business, priesthood, leadership and advocacy … my experience have shaped me into someone who wants to contribute my energies, skills and efforts toward positive, life-changing impact.”

That got me thinking – what brings me here? What brings other social entrepreneurs to this point in their journeys?

What are our stories and how have they led us to a point where we are wanting to dedicate our lives to bringing social change and using social enterprise to do it?

For me the key things in my story really centre around the fact that all I ever wanted to be while I was growing up was a teacher. Back then I was thinking in terms of primary kids – but then after 2 years at Uni doing that I realised how bad I was at it. All through my teenage years I volunteered in children and young people’s work.

I then came across the issue of homelessness and spent the next 7 years working in that sector. Firstly, working directly with the homeless people helping them to take steps forward towards a stable and secure life. Then I moved to teaching local community groups how to work with homeless people. It was here I discovered social enterprise – when we ran out of funding and had to look to generating income to survive. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable 2 years doing a part-time MA in Social Enterprise at the University of East London because of that.

The next part of my life involved working with charities on their organisational development, business planning and social enterprise development. This then became The Tool Factory which is where I am today – developing resources and software for social entrepreneurs and teaching social entrepreneurs on the University of East London’s BA in Social Enterprise.

Looking back, and following the themes of my life the focus has been on supporting and empowering others. This is where my Personal Mission Statement has come from:

“to empower others to achieve their potential”

For me I’m at my happiest, my most effective and my most fulfilled when I’m able to work towards achieving this. There are two other elements to this – my calling, I suppose you could call it – my ‘spiritual discontent‘ and ‘my strengths‘. I’ll post on those over the next week.

For now though, the question to consider is this:

What brings you here?

Ponder on that for a while and then Read the book

I suppose it depends what the question is?

If the question is What can create employment, improve public services and make the most of the inherent entrepreneurial spirit found in communities within South Africa? … then yes, one of the answers will be Social Enterprise.

I’ve have a growing interest in South Africa – mainly due to the fact I’ve had the opportunity to visit twice this year and meet social entrepreneurs working out there, and because we are based in South West London where there are more South Africans than Brits. We are well-versed in the ways of the braai and Springboks.

All of the staff past and present, bar one, at The Tool Factory have been South Africans. But more on that another time.

My interest in social enterprise in South Africa has been re-awakened with the launch of UnLtd South Africa and their upcoming study tour there. I’ve booked my place already.

I am a big fan of UnLtd. What seems like many years ago, The Tool Factory’s predecessor 2amase was founded with an UnLtd Level 1 award. I really like the way they work with on the ground with social entrepreneurs, providing a mix of finance and support – both more general mentoring and access to technical support. If you haven’t kept up with what they are doing just spend some time on their website reading through the profiles of their Award winners for inspiration.

There are some very interesting things happening over in South Africa in relation to social enterprise already:

Me’Kasi Clothing Range – supporting a housing project for teenage boys in Cape Town [we'll be launching their t-shirts here sometime before Christmas]

Hillcrest Aids Centre Jewellery – amazing beaded jewellery made by the women who are part of the project [we still have some jewellery left from an event we ran - contact me for a price list]

Social Entrepreneurship in South Africa – the brainchild of Max Pichulik, a mixture of post from South African based social enterprise and other things going on across the world that are useful to social entrepreneurs based in South Africa

Southern Africa Sustainable Development Initiative – the guys here are also very involved at the University of Cape Town teaching on their enterprise programmes and supporting entrepreneurs (including those of a social persuasion), one of the projects they are working with is a construction social enterprise to based in one of the townships

Connect-123 – this organisation runs volunteer and internship programmes across the world in February 2010 they are running a semester long social entrepreneurship study programme with the University of Cape Town.

These are just a few of things I’ve come across happening around social enterprise in South Africa – does anyone know of anything else we can add to the list?

What I’m hoping for from the study tour next year is the opportunity to see what is already happening in the way of social enterprise in South Africa. Consider if there’s anything that we’ve learnt in the UK that would work, and what things we do here that just won’t work over there.

And of course, it’ll be the middle of summer when we go so it would only be right to spend some time on the beach!

At The Tool Factory, the social enterprise that I run, there is a lot of discussion about this topic of Social Impact Measurement.

When we talk to organisations about Social Impact Measurement the most common response is that it just feels like there is now this extra thing they need to do in relation to their monitoring but without having access to the necessary resources to implement it.

The purpose of this free e-book is help you make sense of what social impact measurement is, how it could work in your organisation and how you implement it without having to spend 10K or more on a consultant.

We take the view that every social enterprise and voluntary organisation from the smallest
to the largest can be measuring their social impact. Long gone are the days when just saying that we were doing a ‘good thing’ would secure any funding. Today, quite rightly, funders and investors want to know that the investment they make is going to be making a real difference.

There has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about measuring the social
impact that social enterprises and other Third Sector organisations are making.

Funders, government, investors and corporate bodies are interested in making sure their investments have the greatest impact possible and are looking for ways measure this.

But this is not the only reason why it is good to measure our social impact. The real benefits from this process are those that are created for the organisation itself – not the funders that support it.

If we, in the sector, found a way to tell the whole story of the impact we are having – not just a series of  numbers about how many people walked through our doors – we would have an incredibly powerful tool that would:

-enable us to improve our credibility and encourage people to believe what we say
-inspire and motivate our staff and volunteers
-encourage us to continuously improve our services
-communicate to other stakeholders how great we are
-form the basis of effective and powerful publicity materials, funding applications and press releases.

This is the real power of measuring our social impact – enabling us to market our organisations, inspire our staff and volunteers and attract more funding and investment.

At The Tool Factory we work with organisations of all sizes from the smallest community groups, to the largest of national organisations, from pre-start ups to well-established charities who have a decades of stories to tell.

We believe that each one of these organisations can be measuring their social impact – however small or new they are.

Different sizes and types of organisations will require different tools. However, if we take the approach that as an organisation grows and develops it can build additional complexity into the social impact measurement system that it is using to meet its new needs as a larger, more developed organisation.

For example, a small local social enterprise may find the SROI (Social Return on Investment) tool is not appropriate at the current time. But if they introduce a Social Accounting model now, then when they grow and become more sophisticated as an organisation they can build on the model they are already using and introduce the additional concepts of the SROI approach.

For small organisations we often suggest that they start by measuring just one indicator – maybe related to one activity they are running; just to get them started. Once the organisation is used to this they can then add more indicators and grow their social impact measurement model.

In fact, if we can encourage all new organisations to build social impact measurement into their organisations right from the very start we will, over time, have a sector in which social impact measurement and reporting is the norm.

Let’s just get every organisation started on doing some level of social impact measurement – we can build on it from there.

We’ve just launched a free e-book An Introduction to Social Impact Measurement: A Practical Approach to help answer some of these questions and to encourage more organisations to start measuring their own social impact. As part of the download process we are giving people the opportunity to help us measure our social impact.

Free copies are available from here.

Photo by Bev Meldrum – Sunset Beach, Cape Town

I’m just back from a 2 week trip to South Africa. We weren’t planning to go out and meet social entrepreneurs but they kept appearing out of nowhere!

On the Saturday after we arrived in Cape Town we went with some friends into a couple of the townships. We first went to visit a centre called Beth Uriel. It is home for 34 teenage boys – guys that lived in the townships and who had either got into trouble, or were mixing with the wrong people or who didn’t get much support from their families.

The guys move into the house where they become part of the Beth Uriel family. They are all put through school – with lots of help from volunteer tutors and then encouraged to go onto college or into work.

As part of their fundraising efforts they have set up a social enterprise to generate income. The guys have designed a clothing label called Me’Kasi. A term that means ‘my home’ or ‘my place’.

The Tool Factory has gone into partnerships with the guys at Beth Uriel and will be selling the t-shirts through our website.

To have a sneak preview of what we are going to be able to offer visit the Me’Kasi website.

We also had the change to meet Phil, a social entrepreneur, working on a project that makes high quality shoes and employs local women. But maybe more about him another time.

Have a look at more of my photos from South Africa

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Today I’m re-launching this For More Than Profit blog – we thought we’d have a makeover at the same time. What do you think of the new theme?

The focus of the blog is changing slightly too. I’ll still be focused on the world of social entrepreneurship – I am more passionate about that than ever before. But I’m currently in the middle of my PhD on social enterprise and reading some really interesting pieces of research and thinking. It will be those that we will be discussing – pieces of research that might be of use to us practitioners as well as the academics who wrote it.

There may not be as many posts but hopefully there will be some interesting ones that will generate some discussion.

I’m looking forward to the coming year … it should be an interesting journey.

Listening to the Social Entrepreneur

Following on from the success of the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur event on the 9th October, I have written a brief overview of the day.

You can read the article on the Social Enterprise Magazine website.

We are currently working on a post-conference report and website – we’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Procurement Versus Marketplace

Who are we listening to? This is a question asked in many marketing departments, entrepreneurship lectures and board rooms? Are we here to listen to our customers or to sell them something? The tension between having something sell, or a social justice issues we are passionate about and providing something our customers actually want is a fundamental tension in social business, and it runs to the core of whether we are procurement or market focussed. This is because we have to understand the nature of the two types of clients- the public sector and the wider (broadly private) marketplace. Who are they and what challenges do they present to our business model?

What does the public procurement market represent? The market watchers BIP say that total public spending in the period 2007-08 to 2010-11 will rise from £589 billion to £678 billion. So it represents a huge market, but it is not a single market. This is made up of, in the main, salaries and pension contributions. The rest is massive construction projects, private finance initiative expenditure and defence spending. The Mayor of London’s £3bn budget boils down to £450m of spending on small companies.

Public procurement is an intrinsically rules bound process. If anyone has read the EU Procurement rules, and they are to be reserved for significant sleepless nights, and the guidance on State Aid, they will rapidly realise that public procurement is primarily concerned with the governance of the procurement process- that the procurement should not distort or upset the smooth running of pure competition. Although attempts have been, and continue to be, made to include social clauses in contracting processes, effectively the public procurement market is designed to ensure that no one organisation gains a competitive edge from the procurement process itself. For a social enterprise, which is pursuing a social outcome as a primary objective of business, the procurer or commissioner can’t choose to select a social enterprise as a supplier.

The procurer can’t choose one supplier over another purely because of their status as a social enterprise. Large amounts of public procurement has shifted over the last few decades from ‘lowest cost’ decision making towards purchasing certain public policy outcomes. But, despite this progress away from the ‘cheap as possible’ approach, any organisation can deliver, or appear to deliver, a social outcome. This has been seen in the environmental field, when procurers starting thinking it would be a good idea to include a requirement for environmental management in their prequalification documents. I lost count of the number of ‘Environmental Policies’ I was required to write for companies that wanted to get on the pre-qual list, with no intention of doing any more to protect the environment than printing off a stock-phrase environmental policy. The same is potentially true in other social justice areas- day care services can be provided by any organisation, as long as they appear (in audits) to have achieved a narrow set of social outcomes, but they might well achieve these outcomes and yet exploit their staff with low wages and no pension, or skimp on another cost centre, or exploit food growers in the third world by not buying fairly traded products. In order to be efficient- i.e. provide the service whilst reducing the apparent cost to the public sec tor as well as providing a modest return on investment for shareholders still requires certain costs to be shed.

Shedding costs, however, is a false economy, because the costs (like the carbon emissions we fail to capture and use) don’t disappear- someone else has to pay for them- the costs are borne somewhere else.

Enough of the macro economics. What of the ‘marketplace’? How is this different? The marketplace is less rules bound and its measure of value is based on affordability. Anyone can buy anything, even somebody else’s life. And if I want something I work out how I can generate the cash to buy it- this is fundamentally different from public sector spending which is driven by fixed or reducing budgets. If a company or an individual wants to buy something that is very desirable, there is an opportunity to go and do something (sell more products, get a pay rise etc) in order to afford the product. The marketplace is intrinsically more relationship based- dare I say it- the private marketplace is a more ‘social’ place than the public space. We make more decisions about purchasing based on who we know and what we know about the vendor than we do about ensuring fair competition. The public procurement rules and processes narrow the scope for relationship building, because of the obsession with competition and not distorting the market.

The private market, on the other hand, accepts that the market already is distorted, and that competition is uneven, if not unfair. At the most basic level, differences in the information about a product because of language differences means that a local language product has a competitive edge over a ‘foreign’ product. In addition, purchasers are not unrelentingly rational. We make irrational decisions all the time, particularly over our taste in music or food.

So, to summarise- what is the difference between the public and private marketplaces?

PUBLIC                           PRIVATE

Rules-based                    Relationship Focused

Budget Controlled           Will earn money to afford a product

Efficiency oriented           Influenced by the desirability of a product

Predictable                      Unpredictable

So what does this means for social enterprises? Which market should we be listening to? Which market place is listening to us? Perhaps the question should be- what marketplace is best able to listen to us and why? Although one expects the public sector marketplace to be the one that is the most ethically informed and aligned with our own interests, in fact we must remember that the fact that there is a market at all is the result of the imposition of quasi-free market politics in the 1980’s. This means that the marketplace exists to implement government policy without distorting competition. It does not, therefore, exist to support social objectives that are not covered by (national or local) government policy objectives, nor is it able to listen more closely to one service provider over another.

The private market on the other hand can listen to whomever it wishes, it can contract (more or less) with whomever it wishes in what ever form it wishes. If a company wishes to be hugely inefficient and buy the most expensive product on the market, then it is free to do so. If that product happens to be intrinsically ethical and internalises lots of social costs, then that is a huge bonus. A private market can and does seek to distort the market. Traditionally this distortion is made in the interests of the company, but in some cases the distortion is made for a social justice purpose. The private sector is increasingly engaging with relationship contracting- where the costs of a product is less important than getting the product right and getting the relationship between vendor and purchaser correct.

Because the public sector market is rules-bound it is a predictable market. If you social enterprise relies on a predictable market, then the public sector is for you. If your social enterprise does not rely on predictability, then the private marketplace is for you, but you will need to prepare to weather the changing whims of the marketplace, and be prepared to keep innovating and out-competing the competition- including big corporates.

As the other part in the ‘Doug and Mike show’ due to appear at the event next week I am in awe of Mike’s thinking on variant typologies of social enterprise, all of which I believe to have bearing on the debate here – and I think we come to similar sorts of questions, or sometimes complimentary questions at least, via different routes…

I’ve had an academic interest in social enterprise and social entrepreneurship for a number of years now, with my PhD attained in 2001 in part looking at how Church of England vicars functioned (or not) as social entrepreneurs.  Yet a decade or so before then I worked as a community care development worker when the Conservative government arguably tried belatedly to bring enterprise into the public sector, including the area of health and social care with which I was particularly concerned…

So what contribution do I propose to make in assisting with the ‘listening to the social entrepreneur’ agenda?  I guess my primary question in relation to this debate is ‘what’s in a word or the words?’  I’m not sure whether I’m clever enough or sufficiently versed in particular philosophical ways to make such claims, but it occurs to me that ‘deconstruction’ might describe part of what I’m trying to suggest here, by which I mean breaking down and interrogating the words we use.  Yet what I also see as a supporting element to this analysis is looking at words that may in one instance be used interchangeably, and yet in another be used in such a way only very awkwardly. On the other hand, some words are not used yet conceivably could be.  Why do we talk of ‘social enterprises’ rather than ‘social businesses’, and yet of ‘business goals’ rather than ‘enterprise goals’?  Why do we talk of ‘social enterprises’ and ‘social goals’, rather than ‘public enterprises’ and ‘public goals’?  Could we talk about ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ enterprises and goals instead of social ones?  Why not talk of ‘green’ or ‘environmental’ enterprises and goals instead of ‘social’ ones, particularly if the aims are about recycling or cutting the carbon count?  Why is ‘business’ seen as particularly conflicting with ‘social’ goals and not ‘power’ and ‘status’?  In the end, however, this workshop is about listening to you, and these questions posed will only work if they can help expose insights relevant to that end, including whether this very debate we are having, that ‘we’ after all have framed, is the right one…

So…what do you think?

We have just released 20 more tickets for Social Entrepreneurs for the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur event after they all sold out earlier this week.

These will be the last tickets we can make available for the event on the 9th October 2008, taking place at the Britannia Village Hall in West Silvertown so make sure you don’t miss out by booking today.

Book your place here.