Alternative for jobseekers: Social business

[EditorOne]

I stumbled across this Yunus guy in my Rotary magazine -- no smiles please -- and thought it might alter the paradigm usefully for some of us. In a nutshell: Pick up the abandoned part of Adam Smith's teaching and create businesses that meet social needs, not primarily to make profits. The goals: Fill a social need, provide jobs, make enough revenue to do both successfully and not with low pay, either.

Wikipedia has its faults, but there are links to primary sources in that article.

Hold this thought: Don't be thinking about getting a job. Think about creating jobs. Getting a job locks you into someone else's vision. Creating jobs lets you follow your own vision.

The nice part about this Yunus guy is that he did it, he's not just postulating a theory. Nobody has to equivocate about outcomes, he's got sensing-type backup experience.

 

[lucky12]

You can't really call this an alternative for job seeking, it's an alternative life style. Seems like this would only work in low/middle class.

But then..

How could my social business provide enough cash for me when I need food on a daily basis? Unless my social business deals with some kind of necessities. Such things take up space, how would you solve that? Unless someone in my social business has lots of space to share.

Editor, I don't get it.

Living in an upper middle class area is terrible, nobody is interested in "social businesses" unless they include sex and/or alcohol... They can't help it with what they have tied up in assets and loans.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Hold this thought: Don't be thinking about getting a job. Think about creating jobs. Getting a job locks you into someone else's vision. Creating jobs lets you follow your own vision.

Alas, without investment capital, too many of us cannot think about creating jobs because while we're busy doing that, we're not eating and we're living in homes without heat or electricity.

(I'm thinking of many of the students I work with, not myself.)

I, on the other hand, have been thinking along these lines, but, my own area is so terribly economically depressed that, while I would have an overabundance of potential employees for such a social business, the resources in my can't quite support much.

But, thanks for the link; this seems to offer something nicely between non-profit and the run-of-the-mill business.

Dave

 

[EditorOne]

You can't really call this an alternative for job seeking, it's an alternative life style. Seems like this would only work in low/middle class.

But then..

How could my social business provide enough cash for me when I need food on a daily basis? Unless my social business deals with some kind of necessities. Such things take up space, how would you solve that? Unless someone in my social business has lots of space to share.

Editor, I don't get it.

Living in an upper middle class area is terrible, nobody is interested in "social businesses" unless they include sex and/or alcohol... They can't help it with what they have tied up in assets and loans.

Keep gnawing on it. It's just something to read about and think about. And, of course, eventually you get to choose where you live, who you associate with, what your values are and what you're going to do with yourself for the rest of your life. A lot of folks seem baffled by the choices that dominate the accepted arrangements, but there's really more choices out there than "get a job" or "get a good job."

 

[gruesomebrat]

Social business is a cause-driven business. In a social business, the investors or owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point. The purpose of the investment is purely to achieve one or more social objectives through the operation of the company, since no personal monetary gain is desired by the investors. The company must cover all costs and make revenue, but at the same time achieve the social objective.

I think it's a great idea, but the above quote may be a bit idealistic. If you're already running the business with a modest profit to cover expenses, what would be wrong with a small dividend? Especially if you were to keep the number of shares or the dividend per share low, there's no reason that you would have to pay out all that much in the way of a dividend, but allowing investors to make a small profit on their investment would draw more capital into a business of this sort, wouldn't it?

I had had an idea similar to this, that dealt with some of the domestic problems that we experience in North America, since I believe that we need to get our own countries running properly before we can go into other countries to "fix" them, but like lucky mentioned, it's difficult to run a business for the poor, homeless and hungry when you're in danger of joining your clientele in line at the local food bank.