Is social enterprise sustainable?

The current financial crisis understandably has some do-gooders concerned. Organizations that relied on hefty returns from cutting-edge investments can no longer rely on Wall Street to fund existing programs. News reporters and nonprofit leaders are bleeding barrels of digital ink assessing the potential impact on donations, and charities that relied on debt financing are likely to face some difficult times.

These are no doubt important issues, but the effects of the crisis do not stop with money. It also shapes how people think. Capital markets morph from safe bets to slot machines. Investment bankers become villains. Entrepreneurship seems too risky for hard times, while government grants replace earned income as the symbol of sustainability.

Whether these responses are wise is open to debate, but the unavoidable fact is that they exist. People think about business one way during a bubble and another after it bursts--a response with deep roots in the way we're coded to see success and danger.

While this response may have a measurable impact on cash flow, it has even greater implications for how people perceive social enterprise. The movement has yet to grasp the extent to which it is as much a product of the bubble as subprime loans and credit-default swaps--it's not just a coincidence that do-gooders started talking business when business was good. At the peak of the bubble this gave the movement a rhetorical advantage, but as the economy tanks, this same language can make the social entrepreneur seem untrustworthy, defined by profit, self-interest and the very business practices that created the problems charity now has to solve.

For social enterprise to be more than a passing fad, we must re-think what it means and why it matters. Is Social Enterprise Sustainable? provides my own answers to these questions. I've put it online in both the print version and a director's cut series of blog posts with illustrative pictures and video. It's the first in a series of related projects, so if you read even just a part of it please feel free to share your own thoughts!