Wanted: community conscious businesses looking to scale

What do people do when they look around them and see problems that they want to try and fix? Teenager Ayve Couloute founded Girls Into Coding to get more girls into science, technology, engineering, and maths. Stephen Arnott of Beats Bus Records teaches hip-hop workshops to kids in Yorkshire. And a community in Liverpool created Kitty’s Launderette, a co-operative, ecological laundry and community hub.

All of these people are social entrepreneurs and community business leaders – ordinary people who started out with an unconventional idea that could make a change in their community. All are also fellows of the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), which this week launched Trading For Good. Trading for Good is a five-year project, delivered by SSE with support from Power to Change and The Dulverton Trust, in partnership with The National Lottery Community Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, almost £5m has been awarded to provide funding, education and support to more than 650 social entrepreneurs and community businesses across England.

“There’s a cross-section of people in the world who will be intrigued by this place between mission and money. They’re the ones that we want to unearth,” says Alastair Wilson, CEO of SSE. “Often they’ll be people who come from a place of lived experience, or they might simply have a brilliant idea that will work in a broken market or poorer community.”

According to Social Enterprise UK’s latest report, the UK has approximately 131,000 social enterprises. Social enterprises are businesses that sell products and services in support of a central social or environmental mission. They include community businesses that are focused on and led by their local communities.

These organisations employ around 2.3 million people, and with a collective turnover of around £78bn. In the last financial year, of a collective £1.2bn profit, £1bn was reinvested in these enterprises’ social and environmental missions. The sector has proven resilient in the face of big picture issues including the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis and the legacy of the pandemic that have hit the entire economy hard.

“Social enterprises are an incredibly important part of the economy because they represent exactly the sort of business behaviours we want to see if we want to deliver growth,” says Dean Hochlaf, Social Enterprise UK’s head of policy.

“These are businesses that are making a profit: they’re staying competitive, but they’re using these profits to invest in their core social missions. As a result, they end up tackling the most pressing issues that hold back our economy. Using their profit to improve social conditions creates a foundation for a healthier economy where more people can contribute, more people can work, more people are spending money. That’s how we get sustainable growth; that’s also how we get shared prosperity.”

Wilson at SSE suggests that it’s actually at times of social and political upheaval that social enterprises come into their own. “There are moments where the snow globe has been shaken up and things settle,” he says, “and they’re the moments that entrepreneurs can make a difference, and they’re the moments when things are reinvented, structures are changed, and there is a new and positive energy.”

SSE’s Trading For Good programme, then, comes at an opportune moment. The programme is aimed at community businesses and social enterprises at various stages of development, whether starting up or ready to go to the next level. It does this with a combination of a learning programme (delivered part online and part at locations in London, Birmingham and Manchester) and Match Trading grants that match traded income pound-for-pound.

Wilson says: “A key part of the programme is to plug people into resources and funding and networks they have not had before, to connect them up to each other, so they can get this thing off the ground.”

Mirella Ferraz is co-founder of Share Shed, an innovative mobile ‘library of things’ in Devon. She has taken part in four programmes with SSE, the most transformational being the Trade Up programme which she says helped take Share Shed to the next level. “It makes things happen. If they see an inch of potential in your idea, they’re like: ‘Let’s give it a shot’.”

She found the ‘action-led learning’ particularly useful. “It’s a very specific way of facilitating conversations about the challenges you’re going through. Before you know it, you have five, 10 action points to go away with.”

Ferraz also relished the collaboration and cross-pollination that came with working in a cohort: “If you’re by yourself day in, day out, it’s daunting. Being part of a collective is very empowering. No one can do it all; that recognition is crucial.”

She and the members of her cohort still share ideas and pitch in with in-kind support.

Tessa Morton already had business experience when she launched Act for Autism, which provides training and workshops for autistic children, their families and communities in Warwickshire. But she needed support finding funding in the third sector world, which was unfamiliar to her. “You can’t think about expanding a business if you’re stressed about earning the money,” she tells Positive News.

“Because I started to get funding, I could start to think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to navigate the business. We were able to take time out to write a book, which gave us a platform. I don’t think I’d have had the confidence to know how to elevate the passion project to a business in the third sector world. I didn’t really understand it.”

There’s a cross-section of people in the world who will be intrigued by this place between mission and money. They’re the ones that we want to unearth

Girls Into Coding, a social enterprise created by mum-and-daughter duo Helene Virolan and Ayve Couloute to deliver coding, computing, and robotics workshops for girls, experienced 144% growth after joining the SSE programme.

“The programme was hugely beneficial because it covered a lot of topics in terms of strategy, from marketing to finance. It allowed us to take a step back from the day to day to think strategy, growth, and development. Even when you finish the programme, it’s not like it’s all over. You become a fellow and you can still contact them for advice. It’s a really fantastic group to be part of. I highly recommend it.”

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