Social Enterprise Development

The first National Social Business Roundtable Summit 2017 gathered by the Benito and Catalina Yap Foundation (BCYF) at the Enderun Colleges last Wednesday united delegates of cooperatives, loads of trade, business gatherings, social business visionaries, reasonable exchange, small scale money, administrators, and so forth., to examine how social business visionaries have added to the Philippine economy and how social ventures could be grown further.

The need to define "social enterprises" was seen as necessary as there are government assistance programs in place to support them with more coming as articulated by Senator Bam Aquino, a social entrepreneur now public servant.

 Social Enterprise Development

Antonio Yap of the BCYF had formulated a set of statements leading to a definition. "We made money and we want to help society" characterizes organizations with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) models which often engage in philanthropy.

"Helping society is good for business, but we can only do good if we do well in our business" are businessmen who strive to help society but who also recognize that they can do so significantly only when they have a profitable business. "Because we want to help society, we build this business" are social enterprises, which can either be Social Enterprises (SE) or Social Business (SB). The distinction between the two is that while both try to solve social objectives, social enterprises are more focused in doing so because they integrate their social objective in their cost of doing business; on the other hand, Social Businesses contribute to their social objectives after profit is earned.

Everyone agreed that social entrepreneurship whether exercised by large corporations or by individuals who work with the community to identify needs that could be met by products and services that are community resource based and environmentally sustainable provide greater benefits to the economy and to society. The nature of the business leads to more integration of business and trade players through a more domestic focused supply chain and enhancement of local resources especially local knowledge and skills. Social entrepreneurship engenders a culture of collaboration rather than competition and working as a group rather than individual effort which sets a stronger foundation for Philippine society.

Start ups will certainly have less failures if they are provided the training, skills and extension services so that they operate in a more level playing field. Guided properly these social entrepreneurs will form the seed bed of entrepreneurship for the community with others replicating their success and creating jobs that are still desperately needed in many parts of the country.