![]()
FOUR
The Voices
![]()
Changing business
Could social enterprises offer an alternative to mainstream business in the future? This section presents a range of perspectives on the topic of what might be possible.
We kick off this first group of interviews with Sophi Tranchell, who wants us to stop assuming that it is ‘natural’ that businesses exist to maximise private profit and who reminds us that there are many other ways of doing business that can benefit a broader range of people.
In the next piece, Karin Christiansen highlights how the choice to do business differently can be part of a wider political agenda to promote democracy and mutual self-help.
Roger Spear offers words of caution over the danger of talking up social enterprise as an alternative to both mainstream business and public services without a clear idea of what it can and can’t achieve in the current political and economic environment.
Vivian Woodell suggests that people interested in using business to change the world need to be aware of lessons from the history of co-operation but also to engage with what co-operation means in the twenty-first century. They need to be shown what’s possible by pioneering and innovative new social enterprises.
Lucy Findlay explains why it’s important to define what a social enterprise is and how it is different from mainstream business, in order to help promote the model to a wider audience.
Fergus Lyon also picks up the idea of definition, suggesting that without clarity over what social enterprise means, approaches to social enterprise are coming at the idea of changing business from two different directions at once: one being standardisation as a form of protection against mission drift away from social purposes, the other being the greater variety of approaches to providing all types of value through all existing forms of organisation.
![]()
SOPHI TRANCHELL
The future needs responsible participation
‘It’s important to say – there is another way!’
“The future will be as good or bad as we let it be. We as citizens have to participate,” insists Sophi Tranchell, managing director at pioneering Fairtrade chocolate company Divine. “People have fought hard for political rights but responsible participation is even more than that, it’s about where you buy goods and services and where you work.”
For Sophi, social enterprises promote responsible participation by putting a social mission, rather than a purely profit-making mission, at the heart of everything they do. Divine was set up in 1998 to improve the livelihoods of cocoa producers in West Africa – to help them “take home a slice of the value they were helping to create”. The Kuapa Kokoo farmers’ co-operative therefore owns 45 per cent of Divine and is run democratically at the village, district and national level. In this way Divine’s example shifts the emphasis within society from ‘profit at all costs for a few’ to a wider range of advantages for a more diverse set of people. This means that Sophi sees social enterprises as fundamentally different from corporations with well-developed corporate social responsibility activities because while some activities might be socially beneficial, the profit-maximising priority at the heart of the business has not been altered.
Yet while Sophi sees social enterprises as promoting responsible participation – by providing examples and giving people alternative places to work and buy – she also recognises that for them to really flourish and become more common in the future, they also need to be supported by a society which provides them with open doors to future development. A wider set of people and organisations need to recognise the need for responsible participation and what it means in practice. For Divine, it means continuing to try to do better: “I don’t think doing better is a static thing, we need to continue to raise the bar. We need to concentrate on the value of independent businesses in the face of huge consolidation of food companies in particular. We need to facilitate the coming together of farmers to help them talk about their future and hear their voices. We need to continue to champion traceability and empower consumers to ask these questions.” Sophi also hopes, however, that individuals will take on this message of responsible participation and act accordingly.
As an investment for the future, Sophi has been involved in trying to give young people the information they need to make informed choices: “I’ve been saying, ‘You are going to have to work somewhere – but profit-maximisation isn’t necessarily going to make you happy’. One of the things that is scary is the image of business portrayed by Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice. It’s important to say – there is another way!” Luckily for Sophi, everyone likes to hear about chocolate, “so it’s a nice place to start with children and adults”. By talking about Divine’s mission and successes (including the many mainstream chocolate companies now converting to Fairtrade chocolate in their wake) Sophi is able to talk about things that others in the sector may find it hard to get people interested in: democratic governance, alternative ways of distributing profit, fairness and gender equality. “The co-op that owns us has been impressive in promoting the participation of women – which is particularly impressive in that context – and in 2010 they elected a woman president,” explains Sophi, showing how doing business differently goes deeper than just finding different ways to hand out the profits. It’s about the people involved and the system they work within: “You need to bring democracy down to more specific things at a more local level – finding a place to have a sensible enough conversation.”
Sophi suggests that some of the big changes facing modern society may make people realise the need for this conversation. “It’s interesting in the world of chocolate – it’s being suggested there won’t be enough cocoa to fulfil the forecasted demand. We hear about oil in this context, but forget that it’s other resources too,” muses Sophi. “It might be that resources getting more scarce means people have to participate in a more responsible way – to realise for instance that you’re throwing away a third of the food you buy now and if you stopped doing that, you could probably afford to pay more for your food.” She suggests that an appreciation of scarcity may recalibrate people’s assessment of the value of things that they previously saw as cheap or free and therefore took for granted.
Another impetus for change may be that people are slowly becoming aware, after the financial crises that began in 2008, of the immense power and lack of accountability in most corporations, in comparison to governments. “The last five years have been interesting in the sense that people have said capitalism isn’t working – it’s eating itself.” At the same time people have started to realise they do not have sensible ways of holding governments to account over the way they spend people’s taxes, for instance around health and social care:“As a person who is ageing, I start to think, there must be more exciting ways to do elderly care. There’s been a strange thing happened where accountability has been divorced from the democratic process as it stands. They’re running the care on your behalf but is it running in a way you’d be happy with – if not what can you do about it?”
For Sophi it’s important for people to realise that the obsession with maximising private profit is “not natural”, it’s just one way of doing business. Ultimately, in our purchasing and employment decisions she thinks that social enterprises could give us the opportunity to explore other ways of doing business, ways which tackle rather than reinforce inequality. She wonders if people in the future will start to examine “who they are actually working to create value for. If it’s for someone else – why should only company owners or shareholders benefit rather than the value being shared collectively? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
About Sophi Tranchell MBE
Sophi is managing director of Divine Chocolate Ltd, the innovative Fairtrade company co-owned by cocoa farmers. Previously she worked for the Metro Tartan art cinema group, introducing top foreign films to big new UK audiences. Both in her personal and work life, Sophi has, from a young age, been active in supporting social justice, leading her also to be very curious about who owns whom in the business world.
As well as growing a popular Fairtrade chocolate brand in a highly competitive market, for 13 years she has campaigned energetically for the terms of trade for small-scale producers to change, and promoted more socially responsible business models. Sophi has been an elected director and co-chair of Social Enterprise London and, as chair of the Fairtrade London steering committee, she successfully led the campaign to ‘Make London a Fairtrade City’. In 2010 she was given a Social Entrepreneur Award of the Year by Ernst & Young, and in 2013 she was awarded a Good Deals Pioneer Award for leading social entrepreneurs. In the New Year’s Honours List 2008/09 Sophi was made an MBE for services to the food industry, and is on the London Food Board led by Rosie Boycott.
About Divine
Divine Chocolate is the only mainstream chocolate company 45 per cent owned by the farmers in Ghana who supply its cocoa – so they share Divine profits as well as receiving the Fairtrade price for their cocoa. Back in 1997 the Kuapa Kokoo cocoa farmers’ co-operative voted at their AGM to set up a chocolate company in order to access the valuable chocolate market and a year later the first Divine bar was launched in the UK. The company was established with the aim ‘to improve the livelihood of smallholder cocoa producers in West Africa by establishing their own dynamic branded proposition in the UK chocolate market, thus putting them higher up the value chain’. This mission continues to drive the company’s development – and to this end they have successfully both grown sales, and been at the forefront of raising consumer, business and government awareness about the need for fairer trade as well as the catalyst for change in the industry. Divine is also growing its business in the USA, and is available across most of Europe.
Kuapa Kokoo receives four streams of income from Divine Chocolate – the price of the cocoa, the Fairtrade premium ($200 on every tonne), a producer support and development (PS&D) fund (2 per cent of turnover) and 45 per cent of distributable profit. Kuapa Kokoo distributes a bonus from the Fairtrade premium and invests it in improving living conditions, education opportunities, healthcare and sanitation for its members – projects voted for by its members. The PS&D money goes towards maintaining the democratic process and most recently towards an innovative Kuapa radio broadcast. The Dividend is invested in key materials for members and into Kuapa Kokoo’s business.
Kuapa Kokoo’s ownership of Divine Chocolate is delivering profits, knowledge and power to farmers – and they also have a pride in ensuring they produce the ‘best of the best’ cocoa for their own chocolate company: www.divinechocolate.com
![]()
KARIN CHRISTIANSEN
Social enterprise as part of a wider political framework
‘Human beings can do great things together.’
Karin Christiansen has been general secretary of the Co-operative Party since 2012 and her thoughts about the future of social enterprise come from the perspective of a movement that started in the 1840s. But first, we have to clarify the difference between social enterprises and co-operatives. Karin is aware that for some people this is a heavily loaded question, “In part it’s a fascinating conceptual debate,” she says, “but in part it’s dancing on the head of a pin.” Karin makes light of the differences, “The co-op movement and the social enterprise movement come from the same place – people using business and enterprise to change their circumstances. Some co-ops are social enterprises and some social enterprises are co-ops.” Ultimately these are enterprises that are not just concerned with profits and which “often empower the users of these services or goods”.
The co-operative movement perhaps shows the way forward for its baby sister, social enterprise. As well as its large-scale businesses and financial institutions, it also has a party political identity, working jointly with the Labour Party, with which it has a “huge ideological, historical relationship”. Democracy is a key principle within co-ops and something that perhaps the social enterprise sector could learn more about from the extensive experience of the co-op movement. “We have a solid theory of democracy,” Karin reminds me, “it’s not just an ethical thing but it is important who runs a business and who profits from it.”
“In the nineteenth century, co-ops changed the way retail organisations operated, developing new standards in food [production and selling]. We need to influence the norms in today’s markets.” The Rochdale Pioneers who set up the first retail co-op in 1844, did so mostly so that they and their community could buy unadulterated food in the context of the urbanisation that followed the industrial revolution. Karin sees parallels with the way that the social enterprise sector could influence the economy in future. Currently, she says, the problem is the “precedence of the shareholder model of business that is only concerned with profit making. Once they have made their profits, any way they can, we have to regulate and tax them. They cause damage and society has to mitigate it. Businesses should have wider social objectives wired into their purpose – a form of ‘pre-distribution’ so that we don’t have to correct problems after the fact.”
Karin says that there is nothing wrong with markets, “they’re just a tool for exchange, but we should be asking more questions about how they operate”.
“Human self-interest is social. If there are people hungry on the streets where I live it makes me feel terrible. If they’re not there, I feel better, so a more equal society is better for everyone.”
Karin thinks that one way social enterprises will exert their influence in future is by taking on more public services. She thinks that the boundaries between public and private sectors are already blurred and will continue to be less distinctive. Public service mutual models are important. Foundation trusts, set up in the NHS under the previous Labour government “partly worked, but there wasn’t enough patient involvement. The co-op movement has a lot to teach about how you get better at public serv...
