What is Social Enterprise Day?
Social Enterprise Day on 21st November celebrates companies that work to improve the lives of people and the environment. While they still fill a business purpose, they aim to solve societal needs through commercial activities. Social enterprises can be for profit or non-profit and in one way or another have strategies in place that give back. This could be:
- A card company planting a new tree for every card sold
- A toy company that helps create employment opportunities for adults with learning disabilities
- A sock company pledges to donate a pair of new or unsold socks to charity for every pair they sell
- A restaurant or supermarket feeding leftover or unsold food to homeless people
HumaniTea as a social enterprise
As you may already know, HumaniTea is also a proud social enterprise as we give 5% of our profits back to wellbeing and sustainability projects, as well as support events that align with our values. These include events and organisations run by women or ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) people or community groups. These profits could be in the form of can donations to give to attendees, prizes in competitions, or monetary donations.
For this section of the blog we want to highlight the recent work we have done as a social enterprise for ESEA Heritage Month.
Throughout September we supported events:
- Run by 8 ESEA groups (Voice ESEA, EVR, BESEA Rising Waves, East Asian Girl Gang, ESEA Authors, Moon Fest, ESEA Cambridge and Sheffield Chinese Community Centre)
- In 5 cities (London, Manchester, Bristol, Cambridge and Sheffield)
- Held by two international corporations (thank you for inviting us, Meta and Sky)
- That all together reached more than 2,000 attendee who were keen to learn more about ESEA cultures, heritages and ESEA-owned brands and businesses they can support!
Celebrating Social Enterprise Day and supporting social enterprises
If you’re thinking about how you can give back to others or the environment via social enterprises, here are five ways we recommend to do so:
- Check the organisations you buy from if they are a social enterprise or where their profits go to (it might be on their CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility – page)
- Find alternative companies that are social enterprises (for example, if you love ice cream but haven’t tried Ben & Jerry’s, we recommend you do)
- See if companies partner with social enterprises as well, which some major corporations do (for example, IKEA are very good for this)
- Spread the word about them to your friends, families and colleagues, encouraging them to do the same. Or you can buy them gifts using this Social Enterprise Festive Gift Guide! Can you spot us in there?
- Mark Social Enterprise Day at work by highlighting social enterprises or inviting them into the office for an event to sell their products and talk about what they do. You can ask us or find out more about different brands at Social Supermarket, which we are also part of!
And if you’ve got a wellbeing or sustainability venture coming up and are interested in seeing how you can collaborate with us, please reach out to us and hopefully we can! This includes any events for Lunar New Year at the end of January. We also work with organisers doing:
- Women-led or women-only spaces (check out our collaboration with Go Inspire)
- Mental health and wellbeing retreats or sessions
- Sport and physical activity classes (e.g. running groups and yoga classes)
- Charity or educational events
- Anything around the environment (e.g. we have helped with climate crisis awareness and sponsored eco-friendly fashion shows, etc.)
We look forward to working with you to help humaniTEA!