Chris MM Gordon On Social Procurement Opportunities And Social Enterprise In Ireland

Chris MM Gordon is the CEO of the Irish Social Enterprise Network, a National Body for Social Enterprise in Ireland. The Network, set up in 2013, aims to point people in the right direction to get their ideas off the ground or their organisation to the next level.

In addition, Chris is also a Managing Partner of Collaboration Ireland, a Project Director of Social Enterprise Exchange and an Adjunct Teaching Fellow of Trinity Business School in Dublin.

Chris also volunteers as Chair of ‘Far and Wild’ social enterprise.

Chris discusses the Irish social enterprise landscape and why legal frameworks and procurement policies are vital to the movement progressing successfully.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in social enterprise?

[Chris MM Gordon] - I had a good start in life. My folks were both teachers in special needs. They were dealing with young people with mild, moderate, severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities. I remember growing up around their passion for doing this. Many passions start off with your family, and things that happen to you as you go along your journey. I was just fortunate to work with good people when I was in college, and fell into the same circles where I found other people also involved in teaching or outdoor facilitation. I then got involved in youth work, and I presume that all leads back to having good, strong parents who instilled all those values in me from the start.

That's a consistent point we hear in our interviews, how important upbringing and the role of parenting can be.

Listen, we get into this nature nurture argument all the time. It's important; this stuff rubs off. It's important people are aware of the values they'd like to keep for the rest of their life and the experiences they come across which they have been involved in. It’s interesting; people have good experiences when they're growing up with other people who may not necessarily have had the best starts in life or other things have put them in a situation where they're not as lucky as other people. It's important the right values are being taught, and I was just very fortunate to have good parents at the time that really set me on the straight and narrow. This is the whole thing about social enterprise. It's the stuff that's hidden which everybody always knew about in the past which emerged.

There was always something that was a better way. It didn't have to be so binary; either a charity or corporation profiteering. Social enterprise really sits in that middle.

Learning from good people doing good work, for example, teachers teaching special needs, I suppose just shows you there's another world out there that isn't just binary.

As the CEO of the Irish Social Enterprise Network, what are your observations of this social enterprise movement in Ireland?

I'd be fascinated to talk to you about the Australian movement, but I know in Ireland it's been a long road. I think Ireland is 10 years behind our partners in the UK sometimes as well as other places. But in 2019, we had a policy that came out from government, and it was a real moment for us where social enterprise was given a definition and backing by government. We leapfrogged a whole host of different countries by simply this first draft or shot at being able to establish what a social enterprise in Ireland is. I've seen an awful lot of good people getting on with it and doing good work despite government support, and then suddenly we had a policy that labelled these people and shone a spotlight on them. Suddenly we had stronger community, policy alignment, and there was an awful lot more resources being put towards social enterprise specifically. It just changed the dynamic. We gave government a hard time sometimes (because oftentimes they deserve it), but sometimes they're the ones that can be real catalysts, moved by the people that support the government. In this instance, they stepped up to the plate and said, "we recognise this is something that is a benefit to us in the Irish government and to wider society, and we're going to support it." It was a little bit late in doing so, but we got there. The other thing as well, because obviously we're in Ireland and not the UK, we obviously didn't do Brexit! It was a tough moment there, but we maintained European connections. One of the things that has happened in Ireland is a stronger connection with our European partners.

In Ireland, for us, our real growth has been through our connections through Europe, and one of those things had been the Social Economy Action Plan. This language isn't just Irish, it's now European and going global.

There was a resolution in the UN recently for social enterprise, which is transformative. We’re doing the social enterprise piece ourselves and trying to figure out who we are and what we're doing, but we're heavily influenced by others that are already leading the way in other countries too. The last thing I'd say is it's complicated. On the face of it, you can go out and you can say, "we'll just do these things and it'll be fine." But it's all so interlinked; there are so many different types of pieces that are important as part of the landscape. They're not easy, if they had been with, we'd probably have done them by now. They are complex. There's this wicked problem, and in an awful lot of them, there are so many partners, community groups and entities that need to be involved to make it a success, that it could become unwieldy.

We need people who are there to just stay the course, and there is a level of persistence that's necessary. You need to stay the course to see it through, the quick wins aren't so quick anymore. These are more long-term issues that need to be dealt with on a better time scale to change minds and get people on board.

How have you seen the social enterprise landscape change in Ireland and further afield, and where do you see key opportunities to grow the movement?

This is touching on possibly my favourite topic in the world! I always label this as perhaps the most boring topic in the English language. I need everybody to just be mindful when you're listening to this podcast. The word is procurement, and it is transformative. I hope I can make this slightly interesting, but anybody who's been bamboozled by this, and they think that it's the most ridiculous thing in the world, I just want to tell you a couple of things about it.

Procurement, I believe, could be one of the game changers for us in Ireland, for our social enterprise movement and for the wider general movement.

Let’s say you are going out for a hundred thousand widgets (I don't know what widgets are, but let’s say accountants love them). You know you're looking for a hundred thousand of them, you go out to tender, and you go and ask for people to be able to say, "can you provide these at a particular cost?" Let's say two organisations make the final selection, one of them is a social enterprise and the other a private enterprise. They're like for like in aspects such as time, quality, and value. They are equal, totally equal. Absolutely, perfectly the same. Who should win that tender? Now, I'm biased. I believe a social enterprise should win. But is that legal? Can it be done? The answer is yes, and apart from the fact that it can be done anyway because that decision can be made by those people who are procuring, in Ireland, we're fighting for and have included it in policy. Europeans in certain areas have included these clauses also. It means that in addition to marking you for your tender on time, quality, value, et cetera, we're also asking you to mark yourself on how you think you can benefit the community because of you winning this tender. It’s asking that if I give this to you, how do people benefit? Now, the lowest hanging fruit of that is getting people off the social welfare lines or employing people that are socially excluded or marginalised. The harder piece is supply chain, so getting social enterprises who are selling things to sell them into the supply chain. This is transformative and there's a reason why it is transformative. When you go to tender, if you're a citizen of your government, like I am of mine, I want them to purchase and use our tax dollars to do the best they possibly can. They can include these clauses in everything, and it just solves an awful lot of issues. The interesting thing is that it's not necessarily setting social enterprises up to win these things and private enterprises to not.

What happens is private enterprises are more likely to think about how they can include the community benefit in their contracts. Even if they don't use a social enterprise, they're always thinking about how it is they can do better, and society wins.

Procurement and our buy social movement we have in Ireland, our buy social I-R-L movement is about trying to encourage social enterprises to sell products and services and get them into the supply chains. We are trying to figure out how it is that they can win these tenders themselves, as part of a consortium or in the supply chain of a larger entity that could win. Isn't that the world we want to live in?

If you have an opportunity to buy a coffee, in Ireland you can purchase it from a Starbucks or an Insomnia or something like that, right now. That's fine, they are perfectly valid companies. But you can also purchase from a social enterprise like PACE's Mug Shot Cafe, which is a coffee cart helping ex-prisoners (people involved in probation) by giving them an opportunity and second chance to be able to have a career, meaningful wage and meaningful life through a lower barrier entry job, in this case, coffee. I just want to also say, it's the best name in the world for a coffee place that works with people from Justice of Provision, called Mug Shot. You can buy your coffee from anywhere, why not buy it from them? That's the real message we're trying to talk about here. If it doesn't matter to you, then why wouldn't you even quote prices from a social enterprise? You know it's going to affect lives, it's going to positively impact people, and we live in a society where I want to be the type of a person who can rely on government and companies to do the right thing. It doesn't mean to change their entire setup where they get their coffee from, but it makes a huge difference to our social enterprise community.

What advice would you be giving those who are looking to grow their enterprise, and where have you observed common pitfalls?

Our Social Enterprise Network runs the National Social Enterprise Helpline, and I suppose we deal with calls every day for pre-start-up, start-up and established enterprises. There's an awful lot of similar things which come up. I think the two main questions I get is where is the register for social enterprises (which there is none, so you can just call yourself one), and what's the legal form? People are always trying to figure out what that is, and in Ireland it's a little bit trickier. There is however a benefit to that. Essentially, we don't have a legal form for social enterprise, and so we approximate. There are lots of options you could call a social enterprise. In Ireland we specifically get the legal type of question. I suppose just in general, a lot of the questions we get asked are put into a document called the socialenterprisetoolkit.ie. It's free to download for anybody in Ireland or globally. It's about a hundred pages of frequently asked questions I get normally, and we put them all into a toolkit to allow people to answer their own questions as they're going along, and then specifically reach out whenever they need help. A lot of things are around the legal type of question, but the easiest thing in the world is to go and register a company, set up a bank account, set up a domain, and have nice colours on your website. That's the easiest thing to do and it's possibly the last thing you should do.

The much more important thing is to be aware of what legal types are out there because it's important regarding opportunities and what things can be funded. Ultimately, a bad idea is never going to last the three years to break out into something that'll grow. The more time you spend teasing out what that idea means the better. We constantly get asked about homelessness, learning difficulties and opening cafes. The question we always put back is if your thing didn't exist (which they presume it doesn’t), where would you go? What are the options? Then, have you spoken to those organisations? For example, just as a wild example, if you have an idea to address homelessness, in Dublin alone, there's about 18 homeless organisations. They all know their business. What is it that you think you can bring that'll be different to those already in this space, and have you spoken to them?

There's a reason why we do this, it is not to put down your idea. I have no control over whether something succeeds or fails, I passionately believe people will find a way. But the issue is, all the funders who would fund your idea also fund those organisations, and you must know how you're different to those organisations.

That's a good thing. The other trick is collaboration. If you do come across an idea, something that you see isn't happening, do your due diligence and research. If you realise there is not a new opening here, you could still go to the organisations that are already in that space. Why would you do that? Because the important thing is do you want to own the impact (so it only happened because you did it), or do you want to see the impact happen? Those are two different questions, and if it's about the impact happening, you could go work for an organisation. They can give you a salary day one and project budget, and they'll go, "what governance do you need? What support wraparound do you need? You can do it under our banner, so go ahead, change the world." If you start anew, you must register with the CRO (The Company's Registration's Office), you need to set up with the charity’s regulator, you need to get a board, you need to raise the money, and you need to do the pilot. You could just hit the ground running if you think a little bit more imaginatively. Do you need to call it the "Chris Gordon Foundation" or do you want to just see it happen? People are far more enthusiastic now working with partners who have the expertise and the wraparound, and it allows people to get a salary day one and not be skimping for the first couple of years figuring out where they are going to make their money while they're helping somebody in homelessness, potentially getting close to homelessness themselves because they can't afford to keep the whole thing going.

If you want to have that impact, I would consider not going alone.

Ultimately at the root of what you're talking about is ego. How do we get ego out of the way?

How many times have you come across people who have genuine passion, they've seen a problem in the world, and they want to change it? These people become so protective of their idea, and I get it. It's not because people are so hung up on it, we really are passionate about these things, and we want to make a difference. We see that something isn't going the way that we want it to go, we think we can make a difference, and we think that sometimes you must do that alone. There are good people out there who want to help make that change with you or for you, if you're not so protective.

What do you believe we need to do, or what do you believe must happen to mainstream this ‘business for good’ movement globally?

There's an awful lot of good movements in the world I've seen. I've been very fortunate to have been involved in the B Corp movement for so many years, and there's a rising B Corp movement here in Ireland. Not necessarily social enterprise, but social enterprise adjacent. We need more of those organisations, because the more private organisations getting on board with social enterprise principles, the better society will be. One of the reasons why I'm so passionate about the B Corp movement is they’re more likely to measure and understand that if they purchase from social enterprise or get engaged with more community and social things, we will be better as a society. I find some of the things we need to be moving towards are prescient. One of them is the world is burning. We don't have time anymore. We need good people doing good things, and we need to have that happening yesterday. There's all this influx of support, I suppose we've got a climate justice warrior in Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland), leading a global campaign about the impacts of climate change. Those are social problems and issues we have a potential for movement or change in. Those things are only going to get worse over the years, so we need to think about integration, we need to think about how we develop society. What's the society we want to live in? What happens when temperatures get a little too hot for people elsewhere or floods or disease or other things? How do we make sure people can feel like they can live in their own homes with meaningful careers, lives and develop consciously?

As for many of the positives we have here in Ireland, we have some crises, for example homelessness. It's not right, we're a well-established country, why is it we have homelessness? It's a scandal. I see a good couple of movements; the European Union are happily involved in the Social Economy Action Plan development with a lot of partners across Europe. We've got a lot of European people representing us in Europe on behalf of the Irish Social Enterprise Network and social enterprises here. Really, they're implying that directives can make a huge difference in procurement and all the things we spoke about. Ireland has policy now for social enterprise, that's important. Our focus in the Irish Social Enterprise Network though is for social enterprise by default. This I think is transformative. If in Ireland, for example, you wanted to set up a business, there are supports available from the government. One of them is the local enterprise office, and so you knock on the door, and say, "hey, I want to set up a business." If you said, "I want to set up a social enterprise," over the last few years, people would've been turned away. Now there's more support for people knocking on that door in some areas of Ireland.

They realise it's a business, they're trying to sell products and services. What we want to do is when we are teaching people the 'start your own business' course, or we’re helping them develop, we want them to learn about how to be a social enterprise by default.

How do you measure your social and environmental impact? How are you thinking about your diversity and inclusion? How are you measuring those things? What are the metrics, in addition to finance, marketing and all those other things? If you fall short of social and environmental impact measurement, then you're a normal business. That's great! Go ahead and be a normal business. But what we really need is people who are changing the game, and social enterprises do that by default. Their resting phase is to change the world. I'm starting to see that people are signing up to these better metrics, and I think social enterprise is the perfect showcase for all of those. How else do you sell products and services, do well in the world, save the planet, employ people who are socially excluded or marginalised and then have some extra income that the community can benefit from as a result?

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which you believe are creating a positive social change?

I already spoke about PACE. Maggie Clune, who is the head of that organisation, won the European Network for Social Integrated Enterprises, European Social Enterprise Manager of the Year Award (what a title)! We've got good leaders in the space in social enterprise. They do several things, one of them is they do this Mug Shot Coffee, where they employ people who have been redirected or are out from prison. They are looking at reducing the recidivism rate, the rate at which people go back into prison by employing them. These are generally low barrier entry jobs, and so food is one of those, and the social enterprise they set up was Mug Shot Café. On that, they used to have wood and steel workshops to teach people and how to do metal and woodwork. During this program, they built this trailer, which now became the cafe they roll around to locations and sell their coffee. I am not lying to you, but one location they sold coffee at were the high courts. Essentially, these former prisoners are now selling coffee back to the magistrates that sent them away in the first instance, which I just think is just beautiful! That is the circle of life right there.

There's one other thing I teach, Infinity. It's only on my mind because we had a project we did with them recently, the Together Academy, which works with young people with downs syndrome who have only a 10% chance of being hired in full-time employment after the age of 18. the Together Academy teaches and trains them on how to be the best in serving food in a cafe they've created, and they do tons of other things. They've got a hamper box they sell at Christmas, and they do it in partnership with large multinationals and a whole host of other things. There are some great examples, I would urge anybody to log on to buysocial.ie. Check out some examples of incredible social enterprises that we have here in Ireland. That list is only growing, and we're supported by the government in being able to provide that list. Anything you can think of under the sun is on that website.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I mostly read nonfiction; I'm fascinated by what makes other people tick. One of the best books I've ever read is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I think that's the type of book I would probably recommend. If you can see that things are interconnected, it makes you less focused on the individual problem at hand and helps you realise these things are systemic. Those type of books and reading gives me the perspective I need, and it can be unfortunate sometimes, because all I want to do is argue sometimes! Most people do when something comes up, they feel passionate about. If you read wider, then you're less likely to stick to your narrative. I learned this tactic when I was younger, which is strong convictions loosely held. I will debate you to the end on whatever topic I'm trying to until you convince me that you've got a better argument. In this, case I will switch to your argument. It's the scientific method, we just need to consistently be better. If you can read wider, you'll realise we don't have houses because somebody decided we shouldn't build houses in Ireland.

It's complex, because it's a system and there are people involved. When you get people involved, it becomes way more complicated, and so the more you can understand people and their perspectives, the more successful and happier you will end up feeling.

You’ll feel less frustrated by other people's intransigence; if you try and figure out what it is they're intransigent about, the thing they're passionate about, it can lead to better outcomes.