The Cooperative Movement and Social Enterprise

We describe the cooperative movement, an early initiative to marry social purpose and commercial enterprise, and compare with social entrepreneurship, a more recent phenomenon at the intersection of philanthropy, public policy, and business. We describe the key drivers of the cooperative movement and social entrepreneurship, the characteristics of social entrepreneurs, and the various organizational forms of social entrepreneurship. We highlight the local specificity of these social movements and their consequent promise of poverty alleviation context-based sustainability, two challenges for which social entrepreneurs and social enterprises are well suited to eliminate. Finally, we draw out some key lessons for financial intermediation from the relative success of social enterprise in addressing key social problems.