Earned income from social goods

You may have heard the term ‘social entrepreneur’, wondered what it meant and sought an answer in Wikipedia. Here is what you will find:

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognises a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organise, create, and manage a venture to make social change.

In addition to operating in a business-like way, social enterprise is also about:

• Social goods: Social enterprises provide ‘products’ that benefit both the individual consumer and others in the wider community too.
• Earned income: Rather than depend on private or government handouts, social enterprises earn income in the marketplace to sustain their organisations into the future.

From helplessness and inaction to social problem-solving

Award-winning journalist and writer David Bornstein has eloquently made the connection between our innate human need to make a contribution, to solve problems – and the lengthy list of unsolved problems that aren’t being addressed by traditional institutions, whether businesses, governments or nonprofits.

I write about people who have solutions to problems, and whose deep yearning in their lives meets the world’s deep needs. There is emotional pain associated with inaction, especially if we care about something.

More from David:

On the other hand, there is the upside of action: doing work that you find challenging and meaningful with colleagues whom you respect and care for. Social entrepreneurship offers this: the pleasure of collaboration, the feeling of satisfaction and thrill of making change happen.

From cosmetics and coffee to ... marriage

Two of the best-known organisations that have applied social enterprise principles successfully are The Body Shop and FairTrade.

By every measure, marriage is not just a private good but a social good. Married couples live longer, healthier and more productive lives. And the children of married couples are much likely to be contributors to society rather than drains on its financial and social capital. Marriage’s wider social dimension has always provided the state’s justification for regulating it.

But, since the 1970s state family law systems has taken over marriage to the extent that it is no longer a state-regulated contract between two citizens. It is instead a three-way contract in which the state is the dominant parter.

And so soon as family law took over marriage, individual citizens stopped buying the ‘marriage product’. Following the path taken by other social enterprises, WeDo Marriage intends to bring marriage back by offering a new marriage that will compete with the family law system in the marriage provision marketplace.

From The David Bornstein - How to Change the World on YouTube.