A guide to third sector trading - WCVA

It’s an idea, but is it business? A guide to third sector trading
1: Getting
started
2: First steps 3: Business
planning
4: Legal and
governance
5: Funding
and
resourcing
6: Financial
controls
7: Managing
growth
8: Management
and
governance
9: Social
enterprise
10: Sources
of support
Business to support social projects: Cwmbran Community
Press, which ran from 1974 to 1989, demonstrates how social
and charitable activities can be made sustainable by successful
community training. It ran a variety of training, community
development and volunteering projects, as well as a long-lived
community newspaper, which were supported by a profit-making
printing business, book publishing and a bookshop. Its eventual
failure was due, as is often the case, to poor business management
rather than pressures from its community activities.
Businesses with job creation objectives: Typical examples are call
centres, landscaping and housing estate and industrial security
companies, where relatively large numbers of unskilled or semiskilled
jobs can be created. The main problem with some of them
is the ease with which competitors operating in or on the edge
of the black economy can undercut the contract rates of more
formally managed community projects.
Charity fundraising: The thrift shops and second hand goods
stores run by organisations such as MIND, Barnardos, the
St David’s Foundation and many others are a common sight on
the high street. The Welsh cancer charity Tenovus generates over
60 per cent of its £7.5m income from trading.
Training: Dove Workshop and Glynneath Training Centre, both in
remote parts of Neath Port Talbot, are examples of a number of
community ventures which have made a successful business out of
delivering training. Like other training enterprises, Dove also runs
a day nursery.
Using property assets to develop community resources:
• The £7m Galeri workspace and arts and entertainment centre is a
social enterprise project on the harbourside at Caernarfon. Behind
this purpose-built social enterprise landmark are more than 10 years
of painstaking work acquiring and redeveloping shops and offices
in Caernarfon for commercial use, followed by the huge gamble
of constructing the Galeri itself. This fine project is the definitive
answer to the many sceptics who are still not convinced that asset
development is the right way for social enterprise to progress.
• Westway Development Trust was established in 1971 to upgrade
23 acres of development land beneath the M4 in Kensington and
Chelsea. Its astute development of land and buildings have created
community-owned workspace and facilities for sports, arts and
education, and made it the richest development trust in the UK.
• Dee Valley Community Partnership in Cefn Mawr, Wrexham,
has embarked on buying and leasing, renovating and letting
properties to bring the pulse back to the heart of the former
industrial village.
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