If you work within the voluntary community, you'll have probably have had to become more innovative and enterprising to maintain the position of your organisation or group over recent years.

Social Enterprise offers opportunity for long term stability - trading goods or services brings additional income to re-invest in resources and long term growth.

Perhaps look at it this way round: if some or all of your grant funding dried up tomorrow, could you still operate your core services? Operating as a Social Enterprise could offer insurance for just such a situation.

As a voluntary or community group, there are many real advantages to operating as a Social Enterprise in MK:

• Whether in whole or in part as a trading arm - you have an opportunity to diversify your income stream, reducing dependency on grant income.
• You are not led by grant income targets.
  
• By joining the Social Enterprise network, you can more easily make joint bids. Smaller businesses have the capacity to become part of larger tenders for work.
  
• You gain the freedom to have unrestricted income to re-invest in programmes.
  
• You'll have the ability to tender for private contracts.
  
• If your organisation is a charity, your trading arm's status as a 'Community Interest Company' (CIC) offers more operational flexibility.
  

Ask your MK Community Enterprise Advisor for more details by calling or emailing us.