Social entrepreneurship emerged in the 1980s, due to the debate on whether to implement corporate social responsibility in companies and the emergence of Freeman's stakeholder theory.

It is nowadays, when due to the recent economic and health crises, social entrepreneurship has acquired special relevance, for being able to detect social needs and transform the lives of individuals and in a broader sense, of societies.

The development of social entrepreneurship requires the existence of social entrepreneurs. Although each entrepreneur is different, many of them share certain common characteristics, and these represent an added value for workers who opt for social entrepreneurship. These include:

 

1. Tenacity: Tenacity and perseverance are fundamental qualities when developing a project like this. This strength arises from the interest in achieving social benefit.

 

2. Rebelliousness: These social entrepreneurs adopt a revolutionary position by implementing an entrepreneurial model that is still in development, in order to bring benefits to society as a whole.

 

3. Creativity: This is a very important quality for social entrepreneurs, they must know how to take advantage of all the resources available around them, optimizing and squeezing them to the maximum, because these initiatives often have limited capital.

 

4. Business vision: Like any business, regardless of its social character, it must be profitable in order to survive. For this, the entrepreneur's business vision will be of vital importance when detecting the concerns of society or a part of it and generating responses.

 

5. Transparency: Transparency is a quality valued in any type of business, so it will be of great importance in any company with social value.

 

6. Vocation: The person who decides to take part in social entrepreneurship will do so because of his or her inclination to altruism and selflessness, generosity, and the will to build a better society. Therefore, vocation is a fundamental characteristic for every social entrepreneur.

 

In addition to this, we find the Charter of Principles of the Solidarity Economy, on which the social entrepreneurship model is structured. It considers people, the environment, sustainable and sustainable development as a priority reference above other interests.

They identify certain values and transversal axes:

 

• Autonomy as a principle of freedom and exercise of co-responsibility.
• Self-management as a methodology that respects, involves, educates, equalizes opportunities, and enables empowerment.
• Liberating culture as the basis for creative, scientific, and alternative thinking that helps us to seek, investigate and find new ways of living together, producing, enjoying, consuming, and organizing politics and the economy in the service of all people.
• The development of people in all their dimensions and capacities: physical, psychic, spiritual, aesthetic, artistic, sensitive, relational... in harmony with nature, above any unbalanced economic, financial, warlike, consumerist, or transgenic growth.
• Rapport with Nature.
• Human and economic solidarity as a principle of our local, national, and international relations.

 

To conclude, to be a successful social entrepreneur you need to acquire and enhance many skills and competences, but this is all part of the long and exciting journey of putting your ideas into practice and starting a social business.

Don't forget that at SECE Project we will teach you how to foster all these characteristics so that you can achieve your goals!