Social Enterprise Workshop

You go to an Apple store, attracted to the eye-catching red Nano, and you buy it. You might later regret splashing out again on these little fancy gadgets, but the good news is you have played a part in helping the people in Africa.

Most of us might not have any idea that Apple has joined the RED project, where they make a collection of unique (RED) products, whereby they give up 50% of related profits to the Global Fund to invest in HIV and AIDS programmes in Africa.

So your purchase of an iPod Nano (PRODUCT) RED can provide up to 3 weeks of lifesaving medicine to someone living with HIV in Africa. The idea is simple, as claimed by RED, “it’s about turning our collective power of consumerism into financial force to help others in need”. The people behind the project don’t expect you to consciously go into Oxfam and buy stuff because you want to donate, instead, they expect you to continue spending money in your favourite haunts, say Starbucks, GAP, Converse, as well as other iconic brands that have partnered with RED; and among all the colours available, reach to their splendid red collections.

This may come as a surprise to Starbucks fans that have never come across RED in their coffee visits. I first heard about this project only days ago from a workshop with the Beyond Profit Society, where Tom Rippin, a former Mckinsey consultant who now runs his own social enterprise, gave the audience a flash back on the evolution of social enterprise, and introduced them to some of the most creative and successful models in this field.

Social enterprise is the buzzword today. People from the nonprofit side may not like the idea that the term seems to imply “making money off the poor”, while conventional businesses may also feel unease as the existence of such a group creates a comparison that puts them in a negative light.

Well, to quote Rippin’s definition of social enterprise, which I largely agree with, “the core idea of social enterprises is that what they are doing is intrinsically good to the society. They directly confront social needs through their products and services, rather than indirectly through the so-called corporate social responsibility”. To put it simply, imagine you buy a bottle of water, and the company claims that 50% of the profit from that product goes to address environment protection programs. But selling bottled water itself, instead of addressing the issue, could even worsen the situation in this case.

Rippin mentioned an interesting model of Fareshare, the community food network, which served to illustrate how business could be intrinsically linked to social causes. The idea is again simple but powerful. Everyday Sainsbury’s has to get rid of tons of food unnecessarily. The apples might be packed in a two for one promotion package, but when the promotion period ends, it’s more costly to re-pack it than to throw it. To dispose of them, the supermarket has to spend money in land-filling. Fareshare approaches them and offers to help Sainsbury’s get rid of the surplus. So long as their charges are lower than the disposal cost, the supermarket would be more than willing to do that. Voila! Fareshare gets the food to help people, and helps to minimize wastes, as well as the CO2 emission produced by land-filling the wastes.

This entry only serves to initiate our discussion on social enterprise, rather than making a simple good or bad judgment. This is a field where many contentions lie, from the ownership structure and accountability of social enterprise, the necessity and implications of having a Social Enterprise Mark, to the future trend of business. As Pamela Hartigan, the director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Said Business School complains “I can’t stand the term ‘social entrepreneurship’. It served its purpose in building a sense of community. But community should not shut out others, and that’s the danger here”.