I’d like to share with you an exciting initiative from the Zofia Zamenhof Foundation. The SocEnter project aims to support individuals at risk of social exclusion and those looking to establish social enterprises collaboratively.

As part of this project, we have created a comprehensive guide that provides essential information and tips on how to successfully start and manage a social enterprise. Below, you’ll find an excerpt from our handbook.

Chapter 1: Social Entrepreneurship

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Nowadays, social entrepreneurship is a broad umbrella term that encompasses activities and processes aimed at giving effective and sustainable solutions to social problems. Social entrepreneurship has developed as a distinctive form of the third sector’s enterprises in the 21st century (Nicholls, 2008). It represents a part of the contemporary economy, especially in many developing countries and involves different figures of changemakers who act as entrepreneurs. The aim of these entrepreneurs is to create opportunities for their communities, build multiplier partnerships, and develop policy changes and market system changes. 

The research, More in Common: The Global State of Social Enterprise (British Council, June 2022), has estimated that the number of social enterprises in developed countries is very wide. Hundreds of thousands social enterprises have been estimated in the United States, 20,000 in Australia, 102,000 in Italy, 18,000 in Belgium, 96,603 in France, 15,855 in Hungary, 29,535 in Poland, 205,000 in Japan. 

^{Event SocEnter, May 2023}

The term social entrepreneur was first mentioned in 1972 by Joseph Banks in his book The Sociology of Social Movements. The author used this term to describe the need to use managerial skills to address social problems as well as to address business challenges. According to Raghda El Ebrashi (El Ebrashi, 2013), the founder and chairperson of Alashanek ya Balady Association for Sustainable Development (AYB-SD), which is one of the biggest youth NGOs in Egypt, social entrepreneurship practices emerged in the 1980s with the establishment of Ashoka, which was the first organization to support social entrepreneurs in the world (Sen, 2007). 

Social entrepreneurship can been considered as entrepreneurship with a social goal while social entrepreneurs should be deemed as change agents or changemakers. Accordingly, one expects that the primary aim of social entrepreneurship is to obtain social returns from social economical activity.

In this perspective, social entrepreneurship operates in the conventional economic system but with a different primary objective. Conventional entrepreneurs aim at creating value for themselves while social entrepreneurs aim at creating value for the community in which they operate. 

Social entrepreneurship shares with conventional entrepreneurship innovation, risk-taking, and proactivity but its objective is to offer concrete and valuable solutions to real social problems. Indeed, in social entrepreneurship, innovation is at the service of the community while risk-taking and proactivity are finalized to solve a social problem. It has been observed that social entrepreneurship can be moved by the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of social entrepreneurs. 

In this regard, the behavioural theory of social entrepreneurship examines the relevant variables that lead to social endeavour creation, the basic association elements and structures, and how these typologies measure the social effect, activate assets and realize effective and sustainable social change. Human behaviour can have a fundamental role in fostering or hindering social and economic development (Huggins & Thompson, 2021). The motivation to become a social entrepreneur is an individual choice although social problems, political and situational factors can influence this choice.

^{Project meeting}

The full handbook is available on the SocEnter project website in English, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and Greek. We invite you to explore the guide and learn more about the entire project. We believe our initiative will help people create stable and meaningful social enterprises.

For more information, please visit our project website: https://socenter.eu/

Fundacja im. Zofii Zamenhof