Non-profit organizations in the U.S. housing sector are increasingly seeking new ways to carry out their missions while minimizing their reliance on external financing sources. To fulfill these goals, some non-profits have established social enterprises.

A firm with specific social objectives as its primary mission that uses a commercial structure to manage the organization is referred to as a social enterprise. Typically, social enterprises work to maximize their profit to finance their charitable projects while still significantly impacting society.

Creating social enterprises is a growing societal trend. It is regarded as a change agent and plays a big part in community development, which includes tackling the homelessness problem. Here, we explore the basics of social enterprise and its importance before discussing how it can help overcome the U.S. homelessness crisis.

What Is a Social Enterprise?

A company with a primary social mission, whose earnings are used to achieve those goals, is a social enterprise. Because it does not maximize profit for the benefit of the shareholders, it differs from a conventional business.

Most of these social companies typically focus on serving smaller communities or groups of people to provide the targeted people with a sense of belonging and security.

There is no one definition of a social enterprise. However, the following attributes are universal in all social enterprises:

• Social enterprises are firms that make money but prioritize doing good for others.
• They use market-based fundamentals to impact and boost the economic, cultural, social, or environmental sectors.
• The business’s earnings/revenue contribute to achieving the objective, which serves as the work’s primary motivation.
• They offer training and meaningful work for those who might encounter employment challenges.
• Social enterprises run services to better the lives of homeless people and seek to remove barriers, generating social benefit through the product and service itself.
• A social enterprise is one that successfully combines financial and social benefits. Social enterprises are distinctive in that they produce blended value ROI that are not social or financial but rather both concurrently, in contrast to the conventional “ROI” used by the corporate sector or the “socioeconomic ROI” used by non-profits.

The benefit of social enterprises is that they are committed to developing innovative projects that are sustainable and can deal with issues on a war-footing basis.