WHY IS SEP JORDAN NOT AN NGO?
Posted on April 10 2019
SEP is the abbreviation of Social Enterprise Project, a name which represents our model. A Social Enterprise is a “hybrid” concept: a for-profit company with a mission to create a positive social and/or environmental impact.
It is what the business does with their strategy and their profits that sets it apart: establishing a model based on fair labor costs, driven by improvement of the target community as well as reinvesting profits to create positive change.
A Social Enterprise puts the right priority and value onto each of the three pillars of the bottom-line. This hybrid business model is yet to be fully recognized by most legal frameworks. There are no globally recognised guidelines that allow a social enterprise to grow and prosper in order to achieve long term social and/or environmental impact. Due to the absence of widely accepted and recognized international standards to define a “SocEnt”, Foundations, Corporations, Agencies apply different interpretations to the nature of the companies they select and the models they support. Usually, we observe a bias towards NGO’s “dressed up” as Social Enterprises.
No-profit initiatives are an essential part of today’s world: in emergency situations such as wars or natural catastrophes as well as in fields such as Education and Health. These situations require large investments with long term results, which often cannot be monetized; NGO’s play a key role here, one the planet could not do without.
When the emergency situation becomes “status-quo”: evidence shows that private sector mechanisms have a higher chance to address and prevent several issues.
When we started SEP Jordan, we made a decision to address all of the above consequences of aid-dependence.
Our priorities and promises to the SEP artist community made it unthinkable to register SEP Jordan as a charity: the model is based on teamwork for the better of the community, building a global brand coveted by the most sophisticated consumer. It is based on building equity value for all the employees and collaborators, with no limit to the upside. There is no “donor versus recipient” component in our business model: SEP artists are the core of the SEP model and the artists and the management team are colleagues.
Do you have questions for us? Please email us: info@sepjordan.com
