At the BC Centre for Social Enterprise, we interface with many community-based organizations seeking to start social enterprises. At our organization’s infancy in 2004, social enterprise was the ‘hammer’ for every ‘nail’ connected to social and environmental inequity. We were so in love with the potential of the social enterprise approach, that we failed to understand its limits. We also failed to recognize that many non-profits and charities are simply not cut out for social enterprise.
One red flag that signals to me that social enterprise is perhaps not the best fit for clients, is when they expect that the enterprise is entitled to be supported entirely by non-repayable grants. My colleague Stacey Crawford undertook some graduate level research that fully shone a spotlight on the tendency for many in the third sector to expect free money for their ventures. In my days as a business counselor for traditional enterprise, this expectation on the part of traditional self-employed folks usually prompted me to suggest that perhaps business wasn’t the best path for them.
