social enterprise

I have found the challenge surprisingly easy and fairly personally rewarding as well as revealing in terms of the reach of the social enterprise sector. There are however areas that social enterprise doesn’t quite seem to be reaching. I have blogged about transport and I can safely add taxis to the list as there have been a couple of occasions where a taxi would have been useful. There are 1 or 2 other things I am missing in terms of my personal consumption that definitely fall into the category of wants rather than needs. I really want a bag of chips from a chip shop but alas I have not found a single social enterprise chip shop in Yorkshire! I can fully understand why it doesn’t exist although it is not beyond the realm of possibility. I tend to buy a couple of CDs a month; there are a couple of new(ish) releases I want to get my hands on but again I can’t find any social enterprises selling CDs, apart from Housing Works in New York, which clearly isn’t a viable option for me buying the new Bombay Bicycle Club album.

In terms of my recent purchases, I have started my Christmas shopping and bought my son some football boots from one of our SEYH award winning social enterprises kick4change who sell sporting goods and reinvest the profits in grassroots sports in the UK and South Africa.

I also visited Re-Work Furniture to buy a storage unit for the house. Re-work is run by the incredibly hard-working and irrepressible Caroline Wherritt who I met about 2 and a half years ago when Re-Work was just an idea and I have been helping Caroline in numerous little ways ever since. Re-Work Furniture is the culmination of Caroline’s dream of being able to provide affordable, quality re-used office furniture to the third sector, deliver environmental gains through reducing waste to landfill and helping people into work who have had trouble finding employment.

Today our kettle broke so I had the challenge of buying a new kettle from a Social Enterprise. Luckily about 18 months ago I visited ethical superstore in Newcastle and met one of the founders Vic Morgan who was a mine of information about ethical online retailing and its potential. Ethical superstore is probably the leading ethical retailer in the UK and has a wide range of useful goods including an eco-kettle, nappies and socks all of which I purchased, undermining my earlier argument that I wasn’t impulse shopping during 30 days as the socks were definitely an impulse buy.