AFG Venture Group

As the end of the first decade of the 21st century appears in the horizon there remain a range of intractable international problems such as homelessness, poverty, obesity, unemployment, and sustainable food production, scarring the social and economic landscape.

Yet the capacity for governments, non-profits, businesses and individuals to resolve such issues is increasingly questioned, particularly as the shadow of the global economic crisis is still spreading across our collective future.

Globally a range of hybrid organisations have emerged to address market failure, either in specific places or with specific groups of disadvantaged peoples. Within the spectrum are social enterprises: business ventures addressing social issues by generating profits through their market-focused business activities.

Most of Australia’s social enterprises are small and grassroots – single enterprises operating in single locations, helping a limited number of people.

As researchers like Bradach (2003)[1] point out, such ‘cottage enterprises’, “represent a substantial loss to society overall. Time, funds, and imagination are poured into new programs that at best reinvent the wheel, while the potential of programs that have already proven their effectiveness remains sadly underdeveloped.”

Many of these enterprises being initiated or run in Australia are smaller ‘cottage enterprises’ that struggle to achieve the scale to broaden their impact or achieve financial sustainability. Most remain localized and within an area of high disadvantage, and most remain highly subsidised.

That’s something I’d like to see changed.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working to create STREAT, a new Melbourne-based social enterprise providing homeless and disadvantaged youth with a supported pathway to long-term employment within the hospitality industry. Our organisation has three main functions: provision of holistic social support to local homeless youth, provision of vocational training in hospitality to the youth, and management of a social enterprise foodservice business, providing work experience for the youth and generating income for the overall enterprise.

Our first foodservice offering is a mobile street café situated at Federation Square and targeting the 8 million visitors and event goers who visit the site every year. The café that starts in early 2010 will produce street food dishes from around the globe from a cluster of mobile carts. It will sell food that is not only convenient and well-priced, but also healthy, and socially and environmentally-responsible.

Although Federation Square is our first café location, we’re wanting to expand to other locations within Melbourne in the coming years. We hope that over time the organisation will have a fleet of small micro-enterprises, some of which could be managed or owned by the former homeless or disadvantaged youth in STREAT’s program. In this way STREAT is amongst a small handful of social enterprises nationally – or even internationally – who are looking specifically at franchise-like models for organisation replication or innovation transfer between organisations.

Although the social enterprise sector to date hasn’t managed to successfully scale its impacts globally, it’s my belief that the cumulative effects of not doing so are tragic. But as Fazle Abed, social entrepreneur and founder of the world’s largest non-profit, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), said “small is beautiful, but big is necessary”. Abed would know – his range of social enterprises are active in over 68,400 villages throughout Bangladesh and provide 80 per cent of the organisation’s annual budget of $235 million.

For more information about STREAT visit www.streat.com.au

About the Author

Rebecca Scott is the founder and CEO of STREAT, a new homeless and disadvantaged youth social enterprise due to start its foodservice operations at Federation Square this December. STREAT provides homeless and disadvantaged youth with a pathway from the street to long-term employment in the hospitality industry.

Before starting STREAT Rebecca was the Vice-President of KOTO, a social enterprise café for homeless youth in Hanoi. Prior to this she worked for a decade in management positions at CSIRO, Australia’s premier science research organisation. Rebecca is passionate about the role that governments, non-profits, businesses and community groups can play together in poverty reduction and sustainable development and has worked hard to ensure STREAT takes a collaborative approach to addressing these issues.

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[1] Bradach, J. (2003). Going to Scale: The Challenge of Replicating Social Programs. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2003.

Copyright 2009, Rebecca Scott, STREAT. All rights reserved. All material in this article is the Intellectual Property of Rebecca Scott, STREAT and cannot be reproduced, copied, published, quoted or disseminated without the prior permission of Rebecca Scott, STREAT.

Tags: social ventures

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under AFG Venture Group Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.