You’re going to hear us talk a lot about social enterprise. So, what is this?
Social enterprises are essentially businesses for good. They operate like any other commercial business but exist specifically to make the world a better place.
We’re going to take some snippets from our friends at Social Traders who have done a brilliant job at summarising this.
Social enterprises exist across all industries. They could be a commercial laundry creating jobs for people who face barriers to work (like us!), a gym providing affordable wellbeing services to the community, or a retailer selling toilet paper and donating 50% of their revenue to charity.
There are three defining features of a social enterprise.
- They’re purpose-driven: they have a defined primary social, cultural or environmental purpose consistent with a public or community benefit.
- A substantial portion of their revenue comes from trade (so selling a product or service), and
- The efforts and resources invested into their purpose, outweighs private benefit.
Beacon, and our parent company White Box Enterprises are focused solely on jobs-focused social enterprises. The primary purpose of these businesses is to create jobs and career pathways to people who face barriers to work.
Today there are over 12,000 social enterprises in Australia, they contribute $21.3 billion to the Australian economy each year and account for 1% of GDP and employ over 200,000 people; that’s 1 in 60 jobs or 1.6% of the Australian workforce. This is about the same number of people as employed in arts and recreation services or the mining industry – pretty significant for a sector that is still getting its name out there.
If you’re new to social enterprise and keen to learn more about how brilliant these businesses are and the impact they create, subscribe to our newsletter and learn about the impact we’re creating here in the Northern Rivers region of NSW.
