One Size Does Not Fit All: The Case for Specialised Social Enterprise Support
By Peter Ramsden and Viv Lewis With research by Keith Hackett
September 2006

Introduction

The term ‘social enterprise’ covers a remarkable variety of activity and forms of economic entity. Some social enterprises step into gaps left in local service provision left by the retreat of the public sector, and are clearly still rooted in the public sector.  Other social enterprises model themselves on the private sector, and concentrate on establishing small-scale, profit-centred retail activities employing local labour providing a service that has failed in the market.  Still others start as a response to one-of-a-kind events and circumstances, and end up being one-of-a-kind cases with no parallel in either the public, private or third sector.  In summary specialist support for social enterprises needs to be sensitive, flexible, human-centred, and situation-specific.

This paper is based on the experience of Enterprising Communities (EC), a project financed by the Phoenix Fund, and set up by Voluntary Action Cumbria.  EC closed in March 2006 when the Phoenix Fund itself ended.   During its four years of activity EC worked with 46 emerging and 120 existing social enterprises, each of which arose out of specific circumstances and required specific, finely tuned kinds of help and expertise.  In this report, five case studies were selected to illustrate the work of EC. They were selected both for their intrinsic interest but also because together they serve well to illustrate the diversity of forms of social enterprise. 

The five case studies

The five case studies presented in this document are:

  • Eden Artisans, a social enterprise studio set up to enable a group of artists to jointly sell their product;
  • Melmerby and Fellside Shop Ltd., a community-owned shop that survives despite
  • Growing Well, a horticulture enterprise that supports people recovering from mental health problems;
  • Watchtree Nature Reserve, a community-controlled and -operated nature reserve, which, amazingly, was built on a former foot-and-mouth disease burial site;

Lowick School, a radical experiment in combating primary school closure by developing a social enterprise model for a school in a rural area