Capitalism in Crisis? – State of Social Enterprise Survey 2019

Our Buy Social Corporate Challenge is now entering its ninth year of supporting big businesses to bring social enterprises into their supply chains. Since launching at Downing Street in 2016, £477 million has been spent with social enterprises by 30 major corporate partners across all business sectors. The premise of the Challenge is simple: working with corporates to use their core business spend to create positive social and environmental impact. Our latest annual report shows the Challenge had the most successful year ever, as partners spent £123 million with social enterprise suppliers. Read on to find out more about the transformative impact of social procurement.

Our new report, published with the London School of Economics and supported by the Connect Fund, uses elite education as a proxy to investigate aspects of diversity not yet well analysed in the social investment sector: socio-economic inclusion, and the role of power and privilege among those who work for social investors.

Based on a quarterly survey of our members, the latest Insight Paper on our Social Enterprise Knowledge Centre gives us a snapshot of sector conditions and expectations. This new research focused on social enterprises’ ability to increase turnover and generate profit during ongoing economic turmoil but also explored property status, trading with local government and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the sector.