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Social business

• Muhammad Yunus Creating a World Without Poverty

"A social business is a company that is cause-driven rather than profit driven, with the potential to act as a change agent for the world....A social business is not a charity. It is a business in every sense. It has to recover its full costs while achieving its social objective. When you are running a business, you think differently and work differently than when you are running a charity. And this makes all the difference in defining social business and its impact on society." (p22)

"...social business is a subset of social entrepreneurship. All those who design and run social businesses are social entrepreneurs. But not all social entrepreneurs are engaged in social businesses" (p32)

"Social businesses can become powerful players in the national and international economy, but we have a long way to go to achieve that goal...It is not because they [social businesses] lack growth potential, but because conceptually people neither recognize their existence nor make any room for them in the market. They are considered freaks and kept outside the mainstream...Once we recognize social business as a valid economic structure, supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms, and rules will come into being to help it become mainstream." (p34) 

"...the bank said the poor were not credit-worthy. They had no credit histories and no collateral to offer, and because they were illiterate they couldn't even fill out the necessary paperwork. The idea of lending to such people flew in the face of every rule the bankers lived by....The bankers' rules struck me as arbitrary and counterproductive. In effect, they meant that the bank would lend money only to people who already had money." (p47)

"In the past, financial institutions always asked themselves, 'Are the poor credit-worthy?' and always answered no. As a result, the poor were simply ignored and left out of the financial system, as if they didn't exist. I reversed the question: 'Are the banks people-worthy?' When I discovered that they were not, I realized that it was time to create a new kind of bank....we must come up with new ways to recognize a person by his or own worth, not by artificial sticks imposed by a biased system." (p49)

"If poverty is to be reduced or eliminated, the next generation must be our focus. We must prepare them to peel off all signs and stigmas of poverty, and instill in them a sense of human dignity and hope for the future." (p55)

"The credit we offer the poor is not just a matter of entries in a ledger book or even a handful of bills handed over to a person. It is a tool for reshaping lives, and neither the staff of the Grameen Bank nor our borrowers ever lose sight of that reality." (p60)

"To free people from poverty, all aspects of their lives need to be addressed, from the personal level to the global level, and from the economic dimension to the political, social, technological and psychological dimensions. These are not separate and disconnected elements but closely intertwined." (p75)

• David Erasmus "Don't Ignore 'Good' Businesses", The Kernel (http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/opinion/2027/dont-ignore-good-businesses/) 1st May 2012
  

"Investors are good at investing in the future; they're the ones who help to shape future innovations and future successes. It's up to entrepreneurs to ensure social businesses find sustainable models, but it's also important that rather than give money to charity, investors do what they are best at, and invest in money-making businesses run by passionate people who want to make a difference."

• Norman Uphoff "Understanding social capital: learning from the analysis and experience of participation" in Institutional Analysis