Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The Social Enterprise World Forum 2008 was great for gaining a perspective on an island with a great deal of innovative social enterprise. My guess is that roughly 80% of the attendees were from Scotland and the rest of the UK. Even though the legal regime is somewhat different, I found many parallels with social enterprisers here in the United States and around the world. One of my biggest concerns about social enterprise is how unknown we are in the U.S. to the general public and to policy makers. Here in the UK, I have a vision of where social enterprise in the United States could be in ten years. That's the length of time that Jonathan Bland, CEO of the Social Enterprise Coalition in the UK, said that he and his group have been at it. As I noted in the previous post, it's a major part of UK and Scottish government strategy to invest in and expand the social enterprise sector. In the opening session of the conference itself, we heard from representatives of both the UK...

I’m here in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the first-ever Social Enterprise World Forum . There are over 400 attendees from twenty-five countries, all here to talk about how to use business to accomplish social outcomes. And Scotland is a logical place for such an event. “Social enterprise is a key part of the Scottish government’s social strategy,” says Ruth Parsons, Director of the Public Sector (Scottish government). Plus, the Social Enterprise Alliance is a cosponsor of the event, and we're scheduled to host the third world forum in San Francisco in 2010. One of the fun aspects of social enterprise conferences is to visit the social enterprises. Before the conference was formally opened, there were three different study tours available to attendees. I visited the One World Shop and learned about the history of the fair trade movement. The UK is probably the leading country in the world for consumption of fair trade products, mainly because fair trade has become a mainstream co...