Working in a social enterprise

Social enterprise seems to be cool at the moment, everyone is talking about it and if I'd been writing this yesterday I might have talked about how hard it can be sometimes.  How some days you get in to the office to find that nobody has paid their bills, so you can't pay yours.  That the vulnerable people you are supporting have all had issues or problems come up that they are struggling to deal with.  That even though you have a really important client on the phone, someone that you are supporting has a really serious problem that has to be dealt there and then, because it could, just possibly, be a matter of life and death. 

Then there is the struggle with funding, the difficulty that you have trying to convince bureaucrats, who have a secure job, with a pension and a benefits package that allows them to take six months off on full pay, that the few thousand pounds that you are asking for, for services you are delivering is good value for money.  That the 'spend' can be justified because of the savings it brings.  So you talk about the savings, the fact that you reduce the need for support from other, more expensive services, that it costs over £1,000 for someone to be in hospital for one day and that it costs around £40 per day to have that person at Rag Tag instead

You can't always go into the personal stories, you don't always want to - if you support a person then you support their family too, you stop them self-harming or sitting alone at home and becoming ever more depressed, properly, clinically depressed or suicidal.  To the bureaucrat that person then becomes a statistic a box they can tick, to me they are an individual, someone I have sat and had a cup of tea with, who has shared their story who has started on the road to being more well   We help people see that they do have a purpose, that they can make a contribution, that just because they are only well enough to give a few hours a week those hours are valuable, worthwhile, that they do have something to offer.  We have helped almost 100 people in the past three years, some are now employed again, some are in further education, some are volunteering, some are coming in every week, because they like being at Rag Tag, in a creative atmosphere where they have a contribution to make. 

But on other days, like today, you have a good day instead.  

We need to make money, to sell our products, and so we are, more all the time.  After all that's what social enterprise is all about.  We want to help other groups to support people just like we do, because what we do works, because we want other people to be able to do it too.  So we have spent the past few months working on a series of manuals which will help others to teach sewing and other practical skills.  To learn about marketing, product placement, quality control, enterprise etc so they can ask more money for what they make.  To learn how to generate textile donations so that they to can use resources as we do and help the environment, to process the donations when they do arrive.

So I sent out some e-mails with JPEGS of our manuals asking for help and I got so many replies, so many offers of help, so many possibilities for moving forward.  And that's what social enterprise is all about.  The help and support that we give eachother, the ten minutes that we take to help someone else if we can, the staff and the volunteers and the friends and collegues.  Not everyone I deal with is a faceless bureaucrat who's more interested in figures and statistics than anything else, some officials have sympathy and understanding and go above and beyond the call of duty, just because they can.    There are people in all sorts of organisations who make an effort, who try to help, who make suggestions and give offers of help and people who do more than we could ever have asked at Rag Tag too.

So thanks to David and Lindsay and Pauline and Phillip and Daniel and Mary and Gillian and Fiona and David and Andy and Andy and Rhoda and Jennifer and Vicki and David, because of you and your help and support, today was a very good day indeed.

The Manuals

If you are interested in our manuals and training courses then please e-mail us to ask about costs and the courses that we are running, because of all the help and support that we have had today and in the last few days, they should be available soon.