1. Alex Sobel General Manager
The contribution of Social Enterprise to economic growth in the current climate
Alex Sobel
General Manager

2. What is a Social Enterprise?
Variety of legal forms but really defined by characteristics
Enterprise orientation: They are directly involved in producing goods or providing services to a market. They seek to be viable trading organisations, with an operating surplus.
Social Aims: They have explicit social aims such as job creation, training or the provision of local services. They have ethical values including a commitment to local capacity building, and they are accountable to their members and the wider community for their social environmental and economic impact.
Social ownership: They are autonomous organisations with governance and ownership structures based on participation by stakeholder groups (users or clients, local community groups etc.) or by trustees. Profits are distributed as profit sharing to stakeholders or used for the benefit of the community.1
1 Social Enterprise London

3. Okun believed that wealth transfers by taxation from the relatively rich to the relatively poor are an appropriate policy for government. But he recognized the loss of efficiency inherent in the redistribution process. In Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff Okun introduced the metaphor of the leaky bucket, which has become famous among economists. He wrote: "The money must be carried from the rich to the poor in a leaky bucket. Some of it will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich.“
The “Leaky Bucket” is a useful tool for understanding how a
local economy works. By imagining the neigbourhood’s economy as a
bucket with money flowing in and leaking out, people can
understand the importance of retaining money within the
neigbourhood. They can start to identify ways of increasing the flow
of income into the neigbourhood and preventing the leakage of
money out of the neigbourhood which happens when goods and
services are purchased outside.

4. What difference does it make?
Local Economic Multiplier
Added Value
Re-investment
Employing the hard to reach
Ownership linked to organisation
The Multiplier starts with 1) a source of income (say total income into a social enterprise) and follows how it is 2) spent and then 3) re-spent within a defined geographic area (that is called the ‘local economy’).
The ‘multiplier’ is an economics concept that puts a label on a concept we understand intuitively: money that enters an economy has a multiplied impact on that economy based on the way people spend and respend money. More re-spending in the local economy means a higher multiplier effect because more income is generated.

5. Does it help in a recession
The sector is still growing
Local Sourcing and Labour Market Penetration
Option for redundancy and employee buy-out
Ownership models inspire employee trust
Inspires confidence in Govt caught behind Keynesian and Freedman economic models
Not all good news – reduced funding and corporate marketing threaten sector
Since the start of the recession, 56% have increased their turnover whilst less than 20% have seen it go down. This is a considerably better performance than SMEs in the UK, where only 28% increased their turnover, and 43% saw it go down. IFF Research (2009) BERR SME Business Barometer February Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reforms (BERR)

9. Represent, inform and network Increase public understanding
What is SEYH
Regional Body
Represent, inform and network
Increase public understanding
Mainstream Social Enterprise
Create new markets
Create new partnerships
Signpost

10. What next? You can engage with SEYH in number of ways: Learning Visits
Knowledge Transfer
Partnerships
Social Franchising and Licensing
Developing new markets