Building a Regional Social Enterprise Ecosystem for All with Glenn Parrish, Isabelle Bart, and Stephan Erkelens
Event Recap
On May 25, 2021, Orange County Advisors in Philanthropy (OC AiP) welcomed the leadership of RevHub OC for a virtual webinar to explore the topic of social entrepreneurship. Speakers from RevHub OC included: Stephan Erkelens, President and CEO; Isabelle Bart, Executive Director; and Glenn Parish, Business & Network Development.
In a dynamic conversational-type format, our speakers shared how social impact investing can create sustainable and scalable outcomes. While traditional fundraising can often lead to unsustainable cycles, social entrepreneurship scales innovation and impact—and social good becomes one of the primary drivers of the bottom line.
By blurring the divisions between for-profit and nonprofit sectors, a new kind of organization emerges—a hybrid approach known as social enterprise. As Stephan Erkelens shared, an “impact first” approach connects social investors to accelerate social missions they care about. And it provides social purpose organizations and entrepreneurs with the resources, capital, and expertise necessary to accelerate their missions.
RevHub OC is leading the way as an OC-based social enterprise ecosystem, connecting social investors and entrepreneurs to social purpose investment opportunities.
To learn more, visit RevHubOC.com.
Event Overview
Traditional business models maximize economic return, fueling proficiency and innovation to address ever-increasing market demands. Nonprofits focus their limited resources on attempting to address the world’s greatest challenges, championing their vision for the significance of mission-driven impact.
One segment is restricted by the expectations of its stakeholders, the other is limited by a scarcity of resources. But what if you could harness the business segment’s advantages of economic sustainability and ability to scale and directed them to fueling large-scale sustainable impact? What if social good was not just a byproduct of business success, but one of the primary drivers of the bottom line?
Enter Social Enterprise.
By taking a broader view of what can be accomplished by blurring the stark divisions between for-profit and nonprofit sectors, a new kind of organization emerges. This hybrid approach is now known as social enterprise.
Social enterprises are ventures with a primarily social or environmental purpose, yet culturally and functionally indistinguishable from for-profit businesses. By creating a blended-value outcome of both financial success and social impact, they are capable of creating solutions at scale.
This rapidly growing innovative approach is taking root and exploding in most of the developed nations worldwide. Philanthropists and investors are re-engineering their distinct approaches in novel ways to engage and support this movement by aligning efforts and collaborating in new forms of collaborative catalytic capital.
