I would now like to welcome Helen Haugh,
Senior Lecturer at the Cambridge Judge Business School.
Helen Haugh has been researching social enterprises in the United Kingdom
for many years, and in particular,
she has been working with community-led social enterprises.
Helen, thanks for being here with us today.
Tell us a little bit about, what is the difference between the kind of
social entrepreneurs we have looked at earlier in the session, the individual,
Ashoka-type of social entrepreneurs and a community-led social enterprise.
>> Community enterprises are particularly distinctive, in that they
are led and managed by the community in which the enterprise is based.
Quite often, when we think about social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship,
it's about an individually motivated organization that is being set up.
But with communities, what one is really doing is trying to engage with different
members of the community, to get them involved and to work with the community,
so that the community identifies what it wants to achieve and
sets up an organization and processes and practices that will enable the community to
be consistently involved in the way that that organization is set up and managed.
And we often find community organizations are really, the,
the strength of them lies in the processes that they have set up in order to
maintain that close engagement between the community and the organization.
We have several very famous community enterprises in the UK.
One, for example, is Coin Street Community Builders.
Now this is an organization, a community enterprise,
that is based on the South Bank of London, and the distinctive feature of this
organization is that they were able to acquire through a loan
a large acreage of land on the South Bank.
Now the South Bank of London is an extremely valuable part of London and
the value of the real estate is very, very high.
And there were many organizations, private organizations,
that wanted to own this land, so that they could then
build property, whether it was commercial or residential,
that they could then sell at very high rates that one finds in major capitals.
But there were enough members of the community that were living in the area and
that had strong ties to that area.
And they were able to raise money to enable them to
acquire the land at a price that they were able to afford.
Now to be begin with, they weren't able to develop all of the land.
And in fact, they generated revenue from creating car parking space for
people who wanted to work in London.
But over time, they had created a network of physical assets which combined
accommodation at, for key workers, at affordable rents.
And the accommodation ranges from one-bedroom flats
through to flats that will accommodate large, extended families.
So there is residential accommodation and that is,
has all been designed with environmentally friendly facilities and services.
But at the same time, there are commercial properties that have been developed,
and it is the rents from the commercial properties that
cross-subsidize the rents that are, the low rents for key workers.
There are also business incubation units at different rates for people
depending on their ability to pay.
And what this has done,
Coin Street Community Builders has enabled a thriving community to actually
continue to live right in the center of one of the world's leading cities.
And it is through their community engagement activities,
through cooperative structures that enable the residents, the members of
the community to determine how the money is spent, how the properties are built,
and what the future for that community enterprise will be.
Kai Hockerts
