Our starting point for Leeds Empties was this: what can we do as a business to get better at solving complex social problems? Eighteen months ago we decided to change how we worked. Up until then, we’d been social enterprise support generalists – working with people to help them to set up and run social enterprises in lots of different markets. A couple of things changed. One – the bottom fell out of the business support market. Two – we found ourselves increasingly restless – frustrated by rarely being able to get stuck into a social issue in any great detail. What difference were we really making? So we decided to experiment. We made three big changes: We would focus on one social issue at a time We would go beyond social enterprise and work with anyone and everyone who could help us to make progress on solving that issue … (To read the full article, subscribe below)
Rob Greenland is co-director of Leeds-based social enterprise Social Business Brokers CIC and co-founder of Leeds Community Homes
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