Social enterprise in the UK homelessness sector: Lessons for Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s homelessness social enterprise (SE) practitioners tend to argue that core to the SE concept is the idea that this is first and foremost a business whose income generation function enables it to sustain the viability of social projects. A range of important potential lessons for Kazakhstan emerged from work-based SEs in homelessness sector in the UK with respect to SEs’ financial capacity: (a) ideally, a SE might make enough trading income to entirely sustain its own activities and cross-subsidise a charitable arm/organisation; (b) some SEs might make enough financial resources via trading income to entirely sustain their own activities, but only just enough to “break even” so there was no surplus “profit” to invest in charitable programmes; (c) SEs might make some trading income, but this was only enough to cover part of their operational costs, and so the SEs needed some subsidy to invest in social programmes (the cost transfer model); (d) some emerging SEs make no trading income (so required all costs to be met via cost transfer). This means that it is unrealistic to expect employment-based SEs at least to be able to reconcile commercial and social goals in any absolute sense (Teasdale, 2012a). Kazakh authorities should, therefore, avoid shifting the entire financial responsibility for the social support component of employment-based SEs in the homelessness field themselves.