Black-led Organisations Build Resilient Social Economies

“We support Black people meaningfully leading local communities; if we can get enough Black people in the UK to be involved in initiatives, to volunteer, to formalise a community effort - the social economy will be much stronger and in a much better place.” - Bayo Adelaja speaking at the Social Outcomes Conference 2023.

We recently attended the Social Outcomes Conference 2023 hosted by the Government Outcomes Lab part of Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Our CEO and founder, Bayo Adelaja, was part of a panel discussing the book launch of Oxford University Press’s, The Social Economy Science.

The panel included Professor Mario Calderini, Dr Gorgi Krlev, Dr Eleanor Carter, and Bayo Adelaja and called forth questions on how social entrepreneurship can help us break out of the cycle of social inequality and how impact investment can bring us into a new era of democracy and participation across the funding landscape.

The panel agreed that a shared understanding of open innovation and support for social impact organisations can shift uneven power dynamics within society. For this, we need to ensure that measurement of outcomes accurately reflect the true value of the work these organisations do. DiNN is building communities that co-design and co-produce from a position of knowing, without outdated models creating unnecessary stratification across the sector. 

As it stands, lived experience leaders have a deep resilience but are left continually unsupported by the systems that they are existing in. Bayo shared, “reliance on trusts and foundations for funding, limits creative space for solutions and interesting developments that hold risk, so there is a big question: How can we create early stage programmes that support social entrepreneurs to become independent of trusts and foundations sooner?”

The panel focused largely on the mystery surrounding social entrepreneurship, social outcomes contracting and impact investing. This mystery means that socially-minded organisational structures are overlooked in favour of what is familiar, even though we know traditional commercial models for scale based impact don’t work. The book analyses how social economy organisations have the power to transform society and improve the baseline into economic resilience.

Bayo continued, “How great would it be to be part of a collaborative group working to deliver outcomes at  scale, together, sharing the risks of innovating in underserved communities? It’s still a numbers game at the end of the day and organisations do fail to achieve their contractual outcomes, but in a collaborative environment, we can meet contractual obligations for outcomes even if an organisation fails in the group, so the overall success rate will increase. That means we see more communities and social entrepreneurs flourishing. More organisations that can advance to a stage where they can pay it forward to the next generation of local social entrepreneurs with lived experience.”

The mechanic structure is changing, and discussions like this often find enthusiastic agreement, however, it is hard to ignore the fact that urgency and increased need means organisations are forced to remain in these crystalised patterns with no space to innovate, to method-test, to co-produce. More infrastructure organisations are closing, meaning that even less support is available, with more competition and less collaboration.

Do it Now Now is working to provide the method and the funds for Black-led organisations to have the breathing room for real innovation that will lead to sustainable programmes and long term impact. A resilient economy cannot exist without Black-led organisations building innovative solutions for the communities in which they exist.

The Social Economy Science, edited by Gorgi Krlev, Dominika Wruk, Giulio Pasi, and Marika Bernhard is currently available for pre-order. If you would like to read further on the research and impact of social entrepreneurship and systems change, we suggest this article from Stanford Social Innovation Review.