Social enterprise case studies

The latest count of social enterprise in Scotland, the Social Enterprise in Scotland Census 2017, found about 5,600 organisations that met its test. A third of them are in rural Scotland. Most are small, with 57 per cent taking in less than £100,000 a year. Six in ten earn at least half their income from trading, and the average gap between the highest and lowest paid is one to two and a half. Companies limited by guarantee are the most common legal form.

The examples below are grouped by how each organisation earns its keep.

Heritage and museum trusts

Some of the longest-running social enterprises in Scotland look after its history. The Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther was started by people from the Fife fishing community. Its trust was formed in 1967 and registered as a charity in January 1968, and the museum opened in 1969 in a row of old buildings on the harbour. It holds a Recognised Collection of National Significance: photographs, records and artefacts of the Scottish fishing industry, and a small fleet of historic boats led by the Reaper, a two-masted herring drifter built in 1902. It is still an independent charitable trust, run with the help of volunteers, and it pays part of its way through admission charges, a shop, refreshments and the hire of its rooms.

The Scottish Maritime Museum Trust, a charity since July 1983 according to its entry on the Scottish Charity Register, runs two sites in the west of Scotland. In Irvine its shipbuilding machinery and small craft are housed in the Linthouse, a glass-roofed Victorian engine shop moved from a Govan shipyard in 1991. In Dumbarton it keeps the Denny Tank, the first ship-testing tank built by a commercial shipbuilder, which ran its first model test in 1883. Its collection is also recognised as nationally significant. Grants seldom cover the cost of keeping old boats afloat, so museums like these have to sell something.

Heritage can also be where a whole village’s enterprise begins. Here We Are in Cairndow, at the head of Loch Fyne, was registered as a charity in April 1998 and opened its centre in 2001 after three years of planning. Teaching residents and visitors about the history of the place is the first of its charitable purposes, and from that base it has added a shop and a community-owned woodchip business supplying biomass boilers.

Trading charities

Many Scottish social enterprises are charities that decided to pay more of their own way. The Grassmarket Community Project in Edinburgh’s Old Town, set up by Greyfriars Kirk and the Grassmarket Mission and registered as a charity in July 2010, works with vulnerable adults and trades to fund that work: a café and catering service, a woodwork shop making furniture from reclaimed timber, a conference and events space, and a line of goods woven in its own Greyfriars tartan. The people it supports can train and work in those businesses.

Transition Extreme in Aberdeen works on a similar basis with young people. It opened on the beachfront in April 2007 with a large indoor skatepark, climbing walls and a café under one roof. Paying customers use the facilities, and the income supports youth work, diversionary sport and employability programmes for local young people.

Health has its own versions. Lorn and Oban Healthy Options, a charity set up in Oban in 2011, builds its services around social prescribing. People can be sent by their GP or another health professional, or can self-refer when they want to change how they live, and the programmes concentrate on activity and on staying well with a long-term condition.

Community-owned assets

Some social enterprises exist because a community bought something. On 15 March 2002 the Isle of Gigha, off the Kintyre coast, passed to the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust after the islanders raised £4 million to buy it from its last private owner. In 2004 the trust’s trading subsidiary put up three second-hand wind turbines, the Dancing Ladies, making Gigha the first community in Scotland to own a wind farm connected to the grid. The electricity is sold, and the profits go back to the trust to pay for housing, maintenance of the estate and local jobs.

Gigha is a dramatic case, but the model is common, and the law has moved to support it. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gave rural communities the right to register an interest in land and buy it first when it comes up for sale, and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 extended that right to towns and cities. On a smaller scale, the census found that running community halls is the most common social enterprise activity in rural Scotland.

Employment enterprises

Another group exists mainly to get people into work. The Wise Group, founded in Glasgow in 1983, was an early example. Its early model paid unemployed people a wage while they trained on real work such as insulating homes. It has since grown into a large organisation working on employability, energy advice and support for people leaving prison.

Co-operatives

Co-operatives are the oldest form of social economy business. Two worker-owned examples show the model. Greencity Wholefoods, a wholefoods wholesaler, was founded on 6 June 1978 and has been based in Dennistoun in the East End of Glasgow since 1983. Its workers own it, elect its management committee and keep pay flat across the business. The Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative began in 1977 as a small repair shop and is Scotland’s longest established worker co-operative, with shops in Scotland and the north of England.

The Scottish definition draws its line through the middle of the co-operative movement. A co-operative that pays its members a share of profits is a business owned by its members. One that ploughs the surplus back and locks its assets is also a social enterprise, and the census counts it as one.