Table Of ContentAmbica Medine
Indianna Minto-Coy
Social
Entrepreneurship
Strategies and Social
Sector Sustainability
A Caribbean Context
Social Entrepreneurship Strategies and Social Sector
Sustainability
·
Ambica Medine Indianna Minto-Coy
Social
Entrepreneurship
Strategies and Social
Sector Sustainability
A Caribbean Context
Ambica Medine Indianna Minto-Coy
College of Sciences, Technologies Mona School of Business
and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Management (MSBM)
and Tobago University of the West Indies (UWI)
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago Kingston, Jamaica
ISBN 978-3-031-18532-8 ISBN 978-3-031-18533-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18533-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to all existing and budding social activists and social
entrepreneurs – A guide to their organisational and operational
sustainability in addressing their Social Missions.
—Dr. Ambica Medine
—Dr. Indianna Minto-Coy
Foreword
I have been involved in the two separate fields of sustainability and
social entrepreneurship for 28 and 20 years, respectively. Sometime in
the early 2000s, I was at a conference centre in Scotland, UK, attending
a conference on environmental issues and sustainability in the offshore oil
industry. I was floating around the back of the conference centre, where
multiple other conferences were going on when I happened upon a social
entrepreneurship conference. I sneaked into the back to listen for a while
and was completely drawn in, to the point of forgetting which confer-
ence I was attending. Here was an entirely new community of people,
passionate about social issues and positive societal outcomes. They were
using an entirely different language, but yet were attempting to describe
very similar outcomes. Both were distinguishing between the character-
istics and actions of the agents, and the specialist types of organisations
and organising that such entrepreneurs were creating to achieve these
outcomes.
What did they have in common? Both communities were discussing
and reaching towards “sustainability”. This means ensuring a sustained
activity, both at the organisational level, and at the ecological and soci-
etal level. Some are concerned at the viability of charities and other
nonprofits, proposing that “for profit” management and leadership tech-
niques should be adopted to make such organisations leaner and less
vii
viii FOREWORD
dependent on the very philanthropy that founded them. Others are
concerned at extending the enhanced ethical considerations that have
been created in the nonprofit and state sectors to the private and commer-
cial organisations, to ameliorate the environmental and human harms and
externalities that so-called efficiencies cause.
Since the United Nations Rio Summit in 1991, awareness of the
challenges of environmental scarcity and vulnerability to businesses and
consumers has waxed and waned. During the 2000s, it peaked in the UK
with the Sustainable Communities policy discourse which encompassed a
wide variety of concerns about the social and ecological carrying capacity
of any community, including the households, charities, state organisa-
tions, and businesses in a given locality. There is, twenty years later, a
resurgence of interest in the UN sustainable development goals as the
climate change crisis becomes more obvious. It is good to see social
entrepreneurship beginning to take ecological concerns seriously, and
environmental entrepreneurship begin to understand the human impli-
cations of technology it creates. There is need too to account for the
nonprofit sector and the heightened relevance of financial sustainability,
even as they strive to maintain their people-focused and environmental
missions. This is a theme which Indianna and Ambica emphasise in this
publication, showing the relevance as it relates to the ability to meet long-
term objectives and deliver on the social mission, all in the context of the
SDGs.
Finally, most of the policy focus, and academic literature, in social
entrepreneurship has originated in North America and Western Europe,
with the USA and Canada, and the UK and the EU at the forefront.
This is a problem, because even in the increasing amounts of “interna-
tional” social entrepreneurship literature the lense and academic gaze is
relentlessly western or cast in a “comparative” frame, not allowing the
countries, cultures, and social enterprises to speak on their own terms. In
this book, Indianna and Ambica write as insiders, with deep and broad
experience of the specifics of the Caribbean. Describing and theorising
FOREWORD ix
on the complex of challenges that nonprofits face in the region, the focus
on the particular issues of “small islands” allows the rest of the world to
consider other small island regions as microcosms and laboratories not
just for ecological and human problems, but also for solutions.
September 2022 Dr. Tim Curtis
Associate Professor
The University of Northampton
Northampton, UK
Preface
The twenty-first century can be characterised by the emergence of social
entrepreneurship (SE) as a global phenomenon. Indeed, many initia-
tives and organisations have emerged with the intent of utilising business
principles to address social and environmental challenges ranging from
poverty and social and racial justice to global warming. SE, which applies
to the social sector, takes its conceptual foundation from entrepreneur-
ship, built on business management concepts (Dees, 2001; Nicholls and
Cho, 2016). Operating business-like and generating earned income for
operational sustainability is relatively novel to non-profit organisations
[NPOs] and other Civil Society organisations [CSOs]. This operational
gap is notable in developing and emerging contexts where most NPOs
lack resource capabilities, do not operate business-like, and depend on
donor organisations for operational and programme support (Bowen,
2013). However, there is emerging evidence of NPOs from developed
and developing countries like the Caribbean operating business-like with
earned income and moving towards sustainability, i.e. operating as social
enterprises (Casey, 2016; Lehner et al., 2012).
Notwithstanding the growing coverage of social entrepreneurship,
much remains insufficiently covered in this still young but growing field of
study. Among those most uncovered is NPOs’ operational sustainability,
i.e. NPOs operating as social enterprises employing the SE strategies of
business-like actions supported by earned income for their operational
sustainability in addressing their social missions, enabling the creation
xi
xii PREFACE
of social impact. Advocated globally, social enterprises are the organisa-
tional and operational models for sustainable social change (Kim and Lim
2017; Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship 2020). However, while
the importance of innovative social programmes and earned income are
emphasised with general statements on resource capabilities, the manage-
ment strategies and skills necessary for resource management to operate
and support programme delivery have not been sufficiently addressed.
As observed by the OECD/EU (2017) from their survey of best prac-
tices of social enterprises across Europe, business management skills and
knowledge are essential requirements for social enterprise sustainability.
Thus, adopting SE business-like strategies is important for NPOs and
other CSOs to survive. Still, insufficient evidence and examples exist of
what this means in practice and how it can be achieved. An incom-
plete examination and understanding of the advocated SE concept persist.
This understanding is important not only to the theoretical and concep-
tual development of the field but also in helping to inform organisations
who wish to adopt this model of what social enterprise requires and the
actual practices to adopt towards sustainability. Adding to these ambigu-
ities, because SE applies to the social sector, business acts of corporate
social responsibility [CSR], such as socially responsible business opera-
tions, are often confused as examples of social entrepreneurship, and social
entrepreneurs are sometimes confused with social workers. Arguably these
situations hinder the development of this vital field of study.
By addressing ambiguities and conceptual gaps, this book offers
a starting point for engaging on the theme of the role of social
entrepreneurship strategies in the sustainability of social purpose organi-
sations. It is one of the first to examine the complete definitional concept
associated with the EMES school of thought on the developing field
of social entrepreneurship [SE], demonstrating applicability to the small
island and developing context of the Caribbean social sector.
In addressing the conceptual ambiguities from an academic and expe-
riential perspective, the book provides a much-needed reflection on social
entrepreneurship, including in emerging and undercovered contexts.
Through a comparative analysis of the experiences of NPOs from the
Caribbean (with attention to the emerging context of Trinidad and
Tobago), the proposed book demonstrates the applicability of SE for
NPO sustainability and as an opportunity for social sector performance
