Thursday 20 November 2008

Social Enterprise Day 2008

It's Social Enterprise Day today. Possibly the most exciting day of enterprise week (biased? us?) because it celebrates businesses which are effectively combining commerce with social change. Companies who are, quite rightly, earning a profit from doing good in the world.

We are forever explaining to people that Red Button Design is not a charity, we’re a Company limited by shares. Why? Well we believe that the charity model works excellently for relief efforts and disaster response (think Tsunami) but for long term development projects it is an unreliable, unsustainable source of income.

By running a successful for-profit business in the humanitarian sector Red Button Design, and thousands of other social enterprises being celebrated today, can stimulate competition leading to the reliable development of more effective product and service offerings to benefit some of the world’s most under-served communities.


I'd like to share the following UNICEF video, it's only 2 minutes long and explains far better than I ever could why James and I decided to found the world's first exclusive humanitarian design agency and bring to market the "ROSS".

Can entrepreneurs change the world?
We think so.

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