Exporting Social Enterprise

I was reminded this week of a lunch I went to last year where I sat next to Jon Cracknel, director of the Goldsmith family's JMG Foundation, which funds campaigning work around ecological issues in farming. Jon made the point that in many ways the UK was over-provisioned with funders in the area of food and farming (true at the time, perhaps less so a year later) and that the way to use this over-provisioning was to create successful models to tackle particular issues. He saw the UK as an incubator of experimental initiatives and campaigns, where the funding surfeit allowed a tolerance of the sort of failure rates you might expect from dot com start ups and where the best would survive and could then be duplicated overseas at a fraction of the cost. It was an interesting market based view of philanthropy funding, but he wasn't able to come up with any examples.

The Sustainable Restaurant Association celebrates its first birthday this week. We launched into the teeth of the recession as a not for profit that supports restaurants making positive changes to the way they operate and we survived a challenging first year thanks to the generosity of some of the funders Jon was talking about. Over the last year we've learnt a huge amount and created a blueprint for a successful membership association which, with a little pump priming, can become a financially self sustaining business.

We are now, as a vindication of Jon's vision, working with our first overseas partner to launch in Netherlands later this year. It made me wonder how many other UK initiatives have been afforded the time and space to fine tune what they do, how this fits into the vaunted "knowledge economy" and what could be done to support the export of similar initiatives.