Support for social enterprises

Social enterprise or charitable status – a brief guide

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Organisations operating for public benefit are often described as being one of two categories – either a charity or a social enterprise. However, these definitions are broad and within each there are many variations of form and structure, and confusingly these often overlap too!

This document aims to briefly summarise the two types of organisation and some of the differences between them.

Factsheet 11: Social enterprise

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“Social enterprises exist in the space between traditional charity and mainstream business.” Social Enterprise UK 2017

Social enterprises are businesses which have a clear social and/or environmental mission, which generates the majority of their income through trade and reinvest the most of their profits to tackle the problems they were set up to address.