Shouldn’t the nonprofits become Social Enterprises?

There has been a growing trend in the making: one which speaks more of market-based solutions, scale, innovation, accelerated impact, social enterprises, as a means to financial sustainability. In the hastening consensus around scale and the proliferation of amorphous terms such as social enterprise, social purpose organisations, are we in a way retreating from some of the core developmental concerns and the difficulty that lies behind addressing them?

While social enterprises have their own benefits, there is also an ever increasing relevance of the not-for-profit model, that look to attack some of the most structural of societal concerns. Many of these are on a constant look out for donors who are willing to patiently support their cause and help them sustain for a few more years.

At SSF we have worked with over fifty small and medium non-profits. Among them, we could only find three to four opportunities where an earned income initiative made any sense in a longer term. Following are the cases where we have helped develop such models, in other cases where it did not make sense, we have deterred such temptations.