Green Shoots is established to provide an incubation service for new and early stage recycling businesses in the Green Economy, which are social enterprises, and serve areas of economic deprivation in the Tayside regions, as well as Stirling, Falkirk and Clackmannan regions.  It is funded initially by Communities Scotland through the Futurebuilders Seedcorn fund.

Who is eligible?

Before any Green Shoots incubation service can be discussed, the relevance of the service to the business or potential business, and the eligibility of the business or potential business for Green Shoots, must be established.  Does it really need an incubation service, or would it be better served by a different type of support capability?  Also does it meet the criteria required to be eligible for the Communities Scotland funding support to pay for the provision of Green Shoots’ services?  In other words, is it a social business supporting community regeneration within the designated area (Tayside, Perth & Kinross, Angus, Stirling, Clackmannan and Falkirk)?  Does it fit the Recycling category?  The answers to these questions need to be discussed, but the nature of the questions can be examined in greater detail by clicking here.

What is recycling?  Recycling, in its conventional context, is the process of resource recovery through re-processing.  It is a technological solution to the problem of excessive resource use and waste.  However, recycling, in its conventional context, is a limping and undersupported activity, which the affluent Western world sees as a virtuous gesture towards global equity.  It is still inconvenient, clumsy and uneconomic.  It is growing slowly as an activity, but is still highly inefficient.  Most of all, the mindset to which recycling applies is the opposite of the economically induced culture of the developed world.  “Sustainable Development” is an ideology that sums up the officially sanctioned philosophy, and the concept of development is at its heart.  Yet economic development is predicated on consumerism, which requires the increasing generation of waste to remain healthy.  The less that is thrown away, the less demand for production will grow, the lower the demand, the greater the threat to the machinery of production, wealth, employment and hence sustainable development.

“Recycling” is more than a process, a practice or a technology.  It is a philosophy, dimly understood, and barely studied, researched or taught at all.  It is a means of understanding our world in an entirely different manner.

In Green Shoots, incubation of start-up recycling businesses is taken to mean a breadth of activity never before considered, and never before considered to be recycling.

This is a key innovation in the Green Shoots incubator.

What is a social business?  A social business has been variously defined as a business that is owned by the community, managed by the community, whose profits are for the benefit of the community, whose products or services are for the benefit of the community, or which is set up to employ the community.  The confusion this creates is then further complicated by a tendency to speak of social business and economic deprivation in the same breath, as if the purpose of social business is to alleviate economic deprivation.  The consequences of this muddle are firstly that social businesses are hard to assess and measure, and secondly that they have a tendency to appear to be failures, because the recent fashion to identify them with economic deprivation highlights those that are least likely to achieve self-sustaining life.

The concept of social enterprise long predates the development of the term.  The Co-operative Movement is one example of social enterprise at its simplest, and has maintained robust and vigorous life throughout the economic fluctuations of the last century.  The John Lewis Partnership is another example of a social enterprise that has flourished.  There are many Victorian experiments with social business long before the term was used, from Robert Owen on, which also shed interesting light on the subject.

As if the difficulty with the concept, social business, was not enough, the debate was further blurred at the end of the 80’s by the adoption of a concept of social entrepreneurship.

Social Entrepreneurs

What is social entrepreneurship?  The term was created after the Thatcher years had seemed to elevate entrepreneurship to new levels of achievement.  It was adopted by the social sector to harness its impetus and dynamism within a group that had seemed to be left behind in the economic acceleration of the 80’s. It made the glib connection between capital and social capital, and suggested that, while a private entrepreneur risks capital investment on an adventurous business start-up, the social entrepreneur uses social capital on an adventurous business start-up.  The concept of the Intermediate Labour Market (an intermediate employment stage for the long-term unemployed, between unemployment and employment) had already been invented in the early 80’s as an economic development tactic, but this was adopted as the mechanism by which social capital could readily be deployed, at no risk, since the costs were born by the Employment Services.

Social Entrepreneurship was also undermined by the tendency to link it exclusively to the purpose of alleviating economic deprivation, with the consequence that it quickly became ghettoised.  Social entrepreneurship seemed to be exclusively for the poor – set up in poor communities, employing poor people, offering goods and services that were sourced from poor people and sold to poor people.  They seemed unable to break out of these limitations.  Charity shops, which had existed for many years previously, seemed to be more effective at achieving the same end as many social enterprises born of this theory.

Green Shoots therefore aims to innovate in relation to social enterprise within the new incubator.

Green Shoots offers something that is new in the model of the social enterprise, which will provide a different impetus to the concept of social entrepreneurship.  The core of this new concept is a mixture between the idea that:

• Social entrepreneurship is only capable of succeeding if it has the engagement of the whole society, not just the disadvantaged

• Social entrepreneurship is only capable of succeeding if it has the support and involvement of real entrepreneurs

It will reserve the right to flexibility in the legal model (other than being not for profit, and non-dividend distributing), but it will maintain the need to provide a social service in all circumstances.