The Elephant and Donkey in the Room: Can bipartisan politics sustainably support Social Enterprises?

Perhaps I’m being a bit too critical, but I tend to take a rather cynical view of the idea that government intervention will be a boon to the world of social enterprises. While the “Innovating the White House” article stated that “the federal government should not seek to pick specific “winners” in the nonprofit sector,” that sounds like exactly what their plan and the plan implemented by Obama administration is doing. Simply by directing capital to one social enterprise instead of another, the government is choosing winners and, indirectly, choosing losers.

The article in our reading list that takes a cynical view of this system, the article in the National Review, does so for a different reason than I do. The National Review article takes the slant that left-wing social enterprises have benefited from the Obama administration’s new policies and funds, while right-wing organizations have been slowly “strangled”. While the partisan issues with the system are certainly valid, I see a more overarching concern with the same theme: which social issues do we as a society feel are worth of our support?

Are enterprises promoting religious ideologies worthy of this support? Is climate change an issue these funds should address? Asking different people these questions will yield different answers. Unless we can come up with a bipartisan agreement on which types of issues our government needs to focus on, enterprises who seeks this funding remain at the whim of policy makers. This is unsustainable and dangerous for these enterprises who rely on these funds to grow and function.

Another potential area of concern I see in promoting government involvement for social enterprises is with the “Grow What Works Fund”, which provides funds to organizations creating concrete results. While it sounds great in theory, “performance” in the social sector is rarely concrete, and notoriously tricky to measure. Things like a sense of community, mental wellbeing, increased self-esteem, or creative expression are all certainly valuable and positive things, but measuring the monetary worth of that value is almost entirely subjective. If this funding is limited to enterprises that can create easily measurable results, many enterprises doing very important work would be left high and dry.

* I’d like to note, though, I don’t feel completely cynical about the government’s ability to foster social enterprises. The government does have an important part to play. I see the government’s role as more of a path-clearer and encourager than of a growth engine. As discussed in the articles, the government has vital work to do in refining the tax codes for these organizations, removing barriers to funding access, and developing more tools assess the impact these organizations have on society. In this way, the government is able to promote social innovation across the board, rather than picking winners and losers though their funding support.