What is a Social Enterprise?

 “Businesses that make helping others their business”

The key elements of a social enterprise

• All social enterprises are trading organisations with social values at the heart of their business activities.
• Social enterprises sell goods and/or services.
• Social enterprises have a long-term commitment to create jobs or provide a service for members of the community.
• Social enterprises can either have strong social aims or democratic ownership and management. Often they choose to have both.

The key distinctions in the way Social enterprises operate and manage their business, which make them different from voluntary and charitable organisations:

• Social enterprises generate all or significant proportion of their income from trading their goods and/or services.

Trading does not just mean buying and selling goods, it can include hiring out space, charging for services like training, or having a contract with a local authority to provide services such as residential care.

Types of social enterprise CWCDA support include:

• Community Enterprise: enterprises which serve a particular geographical community or community of interest and have representatives from the community on their board of directors.
• Social Firms: which aim to integrate people who might otherwise find it difficult in the mainstream job market, such as people with learning disabilities or mental health problems.
• Co-operatives: organisation owned, controlled, and run for the benefit of their members.
• Credit Unions: community based financial institutions providing savings and loan facilities for their members.
• Community Development Finance Institutions: providers of  loans and other types of investment  primarily for social enterprises and other small businesses.
• Community Interest Companies: enterprises which want to use their profits for the public good in perpetuity.
• Development Trusts:  community enterprises which aim to develop a community, usually through the ownership and management of property.
• Trading Arms of Charities: set up to undertake trading activity in order to raise money for their charity parent company e.g. charity shops, catalogues, training and consultancy.
• Fair Trade Organisations: committed to ensuring that producers are paid a fair price for what they produce.
• Other types of social enterprise: businesses with social objectives as central as their economic objectives.

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