The Contraction of Social Enterprise

By Kristina Manalo, ERC Blogger

September 5 2009, University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford. End of course ceremony of the Said Business School Executive MBA class. Myself and Clifford Brown, the class representatives, wrote and delivered a joint speech challenging our classmates to consider social and human capital in our perspectives and pursuits of wealth. We declared our commitment to the wider community; we challenged our cohort to carry our convictions through to fruition, to think with equal sophistication about how we can contribute our growing resources towards inclusion and social enterprise; to include all of society in our definition of investors, because we are all bound together by a common future...

Now more than a year later, I reread the speech, remembering the sounds of our voices echoing from the nave whilst we held our audience captive... And I cannot help but wonder, where did it all go wrong? After six months working for free for a social enterprise start-up, I sold-out. I took a well-paying management consultancy contract for a debt restructuring project which has eliminated hundreds of jobs. Many of us in the EMBA V cohort remain in our stable if underwhelming corporate day jobs, and if I’m any indication, our hunger to contribute to social innovation is waning. Or perhaps it’s just that we don’t see how we can reconcile our personal financial security with the pursuits of social enterprise and innovation.

Contracting Ambitions

In this contracting economy, so have our dreams and ambitions contracted; so have our investments in social capital contracted, to be spent safely on those closest to home... We have all but abandoned our ambitions for inclusion and to expand our territory to wider spheres of influence...

Thus the beginning of this blog. The intent is that it will capture the human perspective of economic impact… And as an optimist, I uphold the right to nurture hopes that it will document a journey home – a journey back to September 2009 where dreams were as hopeful and promising as a warm summer afternoon in Christchurch Meadows.