Supporting Organizations for Social Enterprises:Focus on Fundraising

Abstract

　　Social enterprises can be regarded as a new model of modern non-profit organisations （NPOs）.　They are working to challenge and untangle the various social obstacles we face today, such as issues relating to the environment and well-being, the inequality of educational opportunities, and the disparity in income distribution.　Although prompt action must be taken to overcome these challenges, governments alone cannot find an answer to them in a satisfactory manner, so social enterprises have recently stepped in and are shifting the boundaries.　From the viewpoint of sustainability, to accomplish their various targets, they need to earn money by generating their own business.　They also need to receive contributions or investments to continue their activities.　Many start-up social enterprises are struggling to obtain resources such as manpower, contributions, and grants.　As a support organization for fund-raising, non-profit organizations and commercial organizations can be considered.　The former, there are NPO banks, Shinkin Banks, community banks, etc.　The latter there are crowdfunding, etc.　In addition, analysis support using financial data from the viewpoint of management will also be necessary to improve the business management capacity of the supporting organizations.

　　In this paper, we examined the function of the intermediate support organization on the fundraising. Social finance utilizes private capital and contributes to solving social and environmental issues.　In considering cases of venture philanthropy in Japan and issues of sustainable management of citizen funds, hints are taken on the idea of actors and tools by Salamon’s proposal, diversification of fund procurement sources and ingenuity to procurement methods would be important. How to build empathy for mission of social enterprises and mission with fund provider is an issue to be solved.　For future intermediate support organizations in Japan, it is necessary to enhance and strengthen the function to support not only the current function but also intermediary functions and to foster and develop social enterprises.

JEL Classifications:D63, H44, M14