Business with a social face

Business with a Social Purpose - Andrew Mawson on Social Entrepreneurship

It is all about the people not the structures. This seemed to me to be the core message from a tremendous talk by Andrew Mawson, the renowned social entrepreneur and cross-bench peer in the House of Lords who is renowned for his pioneering work since the mid 1980s at the Bromley by Bow Centre in East London, which became the UK’s first integrated nursery and Healthy Living Centre. And which is now fast becoming a beacon in providing the way ahead when it comes to building a legacy for the east end of London post 2012.

As is the right of every living Yorkshireman, Andrew Mawson calls a spade a spade. He was quite scathing of the ethos that pervades much of the voluntary sector and public sector - largely peopled by committees and research professors who have never created anything in their lives and whose dogmatic adherence to fairness and access dressed up as a commitment to social justice rarely achieves results.

Every human being has a passion - most of them legal - so start with people rather than structures. And look to make one project work well before scaling up.

On the way out I bought a copy of The Social Entrepreneur - Andrew Mawson’s new book - the product of nearly twenty five years of living and working in a small area of the East End. And here lies another message from the Mawson talk - that quick fix politicians are best avoided at all costs. As any business person will tell you - it takes many years of hard graft to grow a successful business. Lasting change takes at least a generation.

The media are obsessed with global economic turmoil and the fall out from the credit crunch. But underneath the glossy surface of the financial and business services industries that - we are told - account for at least a third of the wealth and growth of the British economy - there is a quiet revolution happening - the social enterprise revolution. These are businesses that seek to be every bit if not more commercial and entrepreneurial as their illustrious corporate cousins - but which are gradually changing the landscape of the economy. There is a momentum and freshness about the social enterprise movement that will be very difficult to stop.