Some clarifications
What is a Social Impact Fund?
Social Impact Funds, like Adiuvamus Fonds, and other social-for-profit organisations can all be categorized under Social Enterprises, which represent a growing number of newly created organisations that forego the typical profit-maximization or donation-based business models.
We'll explain it in detail below.
What is a Social Enterprise?
There is still a strong debate going on on the exact definition of what a social enterprise is in academic literature, but we are following the three principles set forth by Huybrechts and Nicholls (2012)* concerning the characteristics of a Social Enterprise:
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The social outcomes are the primary goal of the entrepreneur and the organization, and are more important than profit maximization;
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Are innovative through the development of new BMs, products, or services;
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Have (to a certain degree) market orientation that is performance-driven.
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Instead of the typical categorization between profit and non-profit, these characteristics open the way for a spectrum to be created with at the ends the non-profit actors (e.g. NGOs) and on the other the profit-maximizing organisations (most companies we encounter daily).
*Huybrechts, B. and Nicholls, A., 2012. Social entrepreneurship: Definitions, drivers and challenges. in Social entrepreneurship and social business (pp. 31-48. Gabler Verlag.
Creating a Social impact Fund
Utilizing the definition of a Social Enterprise above, it becomes a bit more clear what a Social impact Fund is and therefore what we stand for. The aim of Adiuvamus is not to chase profits to their maximum at the cost of employees, local communities and nature, but our goal is neither to have to rely on the goodwill of donations to keep us going.
In all, we want to achieve healthy returns on our investments made whilst bettering the lives of those involved in and around the projects that we support, either directly (e.g. being employed, becoming a supplier, …) or indirectly (e.g. offering school support).
Want to get to know the specifics of what we will do and how we're going to achieve our goals? Click the button below!