Wednesday, 1 July 2015
"Rethinking Social Enterprise for the 21st Century" - a Draft TorontotheBetter Statement
Torontothe Good?... Not so. TorontotheBetter? Better.
www.torontothebetter.net Since
2004 Toronto’s original online social business
source,
Rethinking Social
Enterprise for the 21st Century –
the position of TorontotheBetter [July1,2015]
Back in the day, Toronto was known as "Toronto the Good", usually meaning it was a pretty uptight moralistic town with the accompanying racism, sexism and inequality. Our TorontotheBetter stands for a fair, inlusive and cvreative city for the twenty-first century and beyond.
In 2015, after now over twenty years of the most recent generation
of social enterprise, with virtual enterprises like Ethical Deal a staple
of many online consumers’ inboxes if not of their buying behavior, with
organizations like Me to We in Canada, and Whole Foods everywhere,
except poor neighbourhoods, these days, global celebrities like Jamie Oliver
celebrated by thousands young people and countless books written about the
potential of capitalism to be conscious or responsible or …anything finer
sounding than rapacious, has anything really changed in the way modern
economies, specifically the Canadian economy operates. In sum what has
been the impact of the Social/Responsible/Sharing/Third Economy? The
following is the opinion of TorontotheBetter, Toronto’s non-profit social
economy portal, whose directory of Toronto social enterprises first went online
in 2004.
Social enterprises, which come in many shapes and sizes each in
their own way want to do good for the world in the way they do business and
with the market place accorded increasingly more economic and other room for
manoeuvre in recent years business indeed has an increasingly important
influence on the quality of life, as has been argued by more than one writer.
Doing well by doing good; who could argue with that?
Nice idea, then but like social, aka responsible, investment it
sounds a lot like having your cake and eating it to. In other words it can’t be
done: any dollar in profit for the sole disposal of an owner is a dollar that’s
not in wages or benefits or community grants or recycling or donations or
training, or anything else “responsible” for that matter. And if private
owners, however well meaning, decide things, the public does not, so there
is no broad accountability. In what follows we ignore, but do not
discount the reasons why the status quo is, well, the status
quo. And we must acknowledge that in fact food habits are changing and the
enironmental and women's movements have ensured that rernewable energy options
and women's economic status are parts of most high-level planning
agendas. So there has been change at the olicy level but to what extent
it is part of a new business normal is less certain. And onn the other side of
the ledger the relentless promotion of market solutions to everything has
ledt Canada again in recession and countless people in many austerity
victimized nations like Greece less well served by their cash-constrained
public sectors,
Setting the fundamental structural problems aside and it’s a big
set-aside, there are other, more practical concerns with the social business
economy as it has evolved in recent years.
1) Most people don’t know about it
2) Most people can’t afford most of what’s being offered by it
3) Most people most of the time think what they buy and
sell in the “un-social” economy is ok
4) Even if people can afford what the social
economy offers it is not physical accessible to them because most social
enterprises in Toronto and other urban centres tend to be concentrated in
certain downtown and therefore expensive areas largely inaccessible to the
99%.
5) The language used by much social enterprise is foreign to what
most people use and so its users seem to be more or less comfortably
talking to themselves
The result is that social enterprise is still pretty much a sector
that is a fringe of, or alternative to, the mainstream economy. The problem
with that is that the mainstream screws up fairly often most recently 2008 and
everybody, including the 99% of innocent bystanders, suffer. We need something
different: a thoroughly social economy. And it is possible for the alternative to
become normal, as the increasingly broad adoption of organically grown
food has demonstrated. But how do we get there? Below are
TorontotheBetter’s suggestions.
1) Social
enterprises must partner and speak with one voice so that they always have a
public voice on issues that arise and can counter the usual business council
voices invited to talk by the main stream media, now owned and/or funded by
organizations they are in theory supposed to be open to oppose
2) Social
enterprises should adopt a social business charter that calls for ALL business,
not just the “enlightened” or “progressive” to incorporate standard
operational principles like workplace democracy, including acceptance of
unions, environmental sustainability, and community investment. The
result would be a new business normal.
3) Social
enterprises must commit themselves to affordability and accessibility to the
majority in whatever industrial area they inhabit
4) Social
enterprises must speak in language people who go to watch movies and sports
events can understand.
Right now much of the social economy in Canada and North
America exists in a kind of bubble. Time to deflate it and let some fresh
air in so all can breathe better.
# posted by Taodhg @ 5:08 pm 
