What You Need to Know About Social Enterprises
On April 16th, Social Venture Partners Charlotte (SVP) will host the annual SEED20 program which identifies, highlights, and connects the community to twenty of the region’s most innovative ideas for tackling pressing social challenges. In today’s business world, nonprofits are not the only ones concerned with being integrated into the social fabric of society. Earlier this week, Forbes ran an article titled the “The Rise of the Social Enterprise: A New Paradigm for Business” which illustrates that businesses today need to make a shift in management in order to be more integrated into the social fabric of society.
Social enterprises are revenue-generating businesses with a twist. A social enterprise has two goals that are equally important:
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- Achieve social, cultural, community economic and/or environmental outcomes
- Earn revenue
In the Forbes’ article, a yearlong research and survey of business and HR leaders by Deloitte revealed that “citizenship and social impact” were rated critical or important by 77% of respondents.
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One of the trends identified is that companies today must be “social” in a truly external sense, and one of the biggest challenges is that C-suite executives are not operating or organized effectively to deal with the new world of economic growth and technology revolution while effectively addressing diversity, inclusion, fairness, equity at work and more.
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There are two dimensions to the evolution of social enterprise.
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- Moving from an organization which operates as a functional hierarchy to one that operates as a “network of teams.”
- Each part of the company looks at the impact of external factors and the company’s footprint in the external world.
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