Grass-root Social Enterprises: Seeking Government Fund or Keeping Independence?

Most articles of this week cover the government fund for social enterprises, which aims at strengthening the social impact and sustainability of great social innovations. Several articles mention the newly-built office in White House— Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, takes the responsibility of defining, supporting and scaling great social innovations nationwide. While checking its official website, I found that there’s explicit measurement and evaluation standards already posted under the Social Innovation Fund page, which makes the funding more impartial and viable. Those government efforts are based on four policy goals—improving access to growth capital, providing seed capital to create a pipeline of innovations, investing in tools to determine what works and removing outdated tax and regulatory barriers to innovation.   

However, situation in China is quite different. Since the government shares large part of responsibility of social enterprises, a substantial amount of feasible social innovations that would potentially generate positive social impacts usually transfer to government projects at last, such as Straddling Bus, which was approved and supported based on the cooperate contract among regional governments. Also, innovations related to environmental issues are often realized by the government, including operating research and producing state-of-the-art technologies. Since the biggest and most powerful social innovations are charged by the government, the rest left are those small social innovations, usually operated at the grass-root level, especially at level of local communities. It’s not easy for them to acquire fund from local government in a long run, not to mention central government.

For instance, one of my friends is working in an NGO called Dreama in Nanjing City, which is a small theater studio aiming at preserving traditional local culture and ethics of the city. The regular activities of Dreama is to recruit screenwriters, directors and actors from college and local communities to cooperate on a drama and play it on weekend in local communities. Those dramas bring forth great impacts in that area, attracting huge amount of audience and filling them with the obligation to protect local culture. However, operating those community-leveled social innovation activities is mostly depended on the enthusiasm of volunteers and local residents, financial fund is always limited. Local government periodically offers financial support when the Propaganda Department defines the theme of some dramas meets the government’s goal—promoting socialism values. In order to obtain the long-term support from the government, the studio may need to tailor its own incentives in order to subject to government’s taste, which, apparently, will decrease the independence of the studio.

Under such condition, how to balance the two outcomes—to ingratiate the government or to keep independence of its own? If choosing the latter one, how to keep themselves financial sustainable in a long run?

Additional Link:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/sicp/initiatives/social-innovation-fund