Social Enterprise World Forum 2008 - Part Two
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...