On Wednesday 30th March, Health Exchange will be exhibiting at ‘Voice 11’, the annual conference of the Social Enterprise Coalition (SEC), being held this year in the O2 Arena. There will be both a conference area and an exhibition area featuring over 130 exhibitors, including more than 50 established Social Enterprises like ours.
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Opportunity and Visibility
Voice 11 gives Health Exchange a significant opportunity to promote our services to an influential audience including government ministers, senior civil servants (including from the Department of Health), local authorities, third sector and voluntary sector organisations, funding bodies and many other organisations we work with today, or can work with in the future. We have a great team of people who have been busy deciding upon the services we most want to feature, and how we can showcase our capabilities in the best light.
Public Sector Reform and Localism
The keynote topics for the conference debates include both Localism – citizens delivering a future for their neighbourhoods – and whether Social Enterprise can deliver public service reform. These topical issues, closely aligned with the Government’s Big Society agenda, are both subjects against which Health Exchange can tell a story of Social Enterprise success, and the breadth of added value it can contribute.
Health Exchange is a social enterprise which was born out of the public sector, and today it is an example of the progress that social enterprise can achieve through innovation and a total focus on achieving the best outcomes for our clients, rather than simply following processes and hitting targets.
The Social Enterprise ‘Win:Win:Win’
On top of the outcomes our clients achieve, Health Exchange’s business model generates additional social capital. For example, by delivering positive outcomes for people and communities we enhance the trust that people feel for the community partners we work with – which in turn enables us to reach and help even more people. Furthermore, in many cases we deliver our services through people drawn from local communities, whom we train and then employ to work within those communities. In this way we create local employment opportunities, as well as providing credible, relevant services underpinned by an essential understanding of cultural and local matters.
Shared Value
A recent Harvard Business Review article,* suggests traditional business is losing the trust of people and governments, and is caught in a vicious circle of outdated, narrow ideas which create shareholder value at the expense of communities and environments. The article identified the emergence of a new approach of ‘Shared Value’ which delivers true value for all stakeholders.
Health Exchange, and other social enterprises like it, already generates a significant net contribution to local communities that other organisation types find hard to match. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, as a not-for-profit company, every penny of the income we generate is utilised in delivering and enhancing the services we provide – we have no shareholders who take a profit share.
Our attendance at Voice 11 gives Health Exchange the opportunity to demonstrate that our business produces value on multiple levels. As well as successfully promoting health, wellbeing and lifestyle choice and providing positive outcomes for people and communities, Health Exchange has also created a successful business model for Public Sector Reform, and one which generates synergistic social value that simply isn’t achievable by working in the way we’ve always worked.
To take advantage of this opportunity, we want to make contact with as many of the conference attendees as possible, create a positive impression and promote the message about how Health Exchange is making a real difference to people’s lives each day of the year. To achieve this, our plans include both creating a high level of interest and activity around the services we will be featuring, as well as the launch of new services to coincide with the event itself.
*(“Creating Shared Value. How to reinvent capitalism – and unleash a wave of innovation and growth” by Michael E Porter and Mark R Kramer. Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2011. Reprint R1101C)
Dame Elizabeth Hoodless, a volunteering advocate and voice of the sector for 40 years, today expressed her fears that David Cameron’s plans for a Big Society are not succeeding.
