Dan Martin: Social enterprise blog

My life experiences are the main reason I chose to become a social entrepreneur. I grew up in a deprived area and I think this always encouraged me to help others. I am passionate about diversity and wanted to help improve the lives of deprived communities and individuals in society near where I live in Bradford.

But I didn't want to tell communities what they needed, I believe it is important to work with them to help find a voice and then to design simple, but innovative, ways to support them.

At Cosmic we are committed to a future of developing social enterprise, using the success of our business to benefit the surrounding community and other local businesses that are struggling to keep up with today's technology-orientated market place.

Cosmic is focused on digital inclusion, helping local businesses, communities, and Voluntary Community Organisations (VCOs) to overcome barriers to making effective use of technology and the internet.

"Social enterprise is the pathway to the future!"
"The road to success is paved with social entrepreneurs!"
"We have seen the future and it is non-profit distributing!"

These are the messages that I keep hearing from various government departments (although I may be paraphrasing their words somewhat).

They say that social care can be better delivered by the third sector. They say that waste services will be more sustainable if social enterprise takes care of them. They're telling local authorities they want to see more services delivered by us.

There is still a tendency to think of social enterprises as micro-businesses, doing good in a small way.

What do we do and what good does it do?
Why do we do it?
Who pays us to do it?

These are the three questions I believe we should all ask ourselves and our colleagues as we go about our working lives.

The danger is that in many organisations the answers will tell you more about what people don't know and understand about their role and the purpose of their organisation and their customer offer than anything else.

In most organisations the same mistakes get made, the same excuses made, the same lessons go unlearnt, over and over again.

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