Had a great meeting this week with the executive director of Korea's Hope Institute, Mr Wonsoon Park. The Hope Institute is a "think-and-do tank based on citizen participation" and Mr Park is one of the leaders of civic society in Korea, having setup a number of non-profit organisations over there including 'the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy', 'the Beautiful Foundation', 'the Beautiful Store' (the most successful charity shop in Korea) as well as the Hope Institute.
Mr Park is on a research trip and asked a number of social enterprises to meet up with him for one-to-ones and to share their experiences and ideas - an easy yes for me!
It was great to talk to him about what we do and how we do it, and he was particularly interested in two links we have;
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Our listing on
SEEWhatYouAreBuyingInto.com - he was interested in our view that we should measure our social, environmental and ethical practices alongside all types of businesses, large and small, rather than concentrate on any of the social enterprise labelling (as it was, we were working with SEE Ltd well before the recent Social Enterprise Mark came on the horizon).
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Our cross-promotion work with
Fairgift, the fair-trade gift list service - he liked the fact that we'd found someone working in the same industry (i.e. the wedding market) that we felt we could shout about. We also talked about the not so good options in the wedding market (and he was keen to try and find someone who could learn from us directly over in Korea).
We've offered before to share our ideas overseas (and have already done so a couple of times) but have yet to find anyone who has been able to replicate what we've done here. Our local Business Link adviser urged us to try and franchise the model overseas to generate income for us here but we're not convinced that fits with our principles - we'd rather give away our input, to the right people, for nothing!
Andy
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