Social Enterprise Day 2018 goes global

It’s Social Enterprise Day on Thursday 15 November 2018 and social enterprises around the world will be using the #WhoKnew hashtag to highlight the difference they make to people’s lives.

Social Enterprise Day is spearheaded by Social Enterprise UK, but it’s a worldwide campaign and it’s also part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The organisers are encouraging social enterprises from dozens of different countries to get involved.

Fiona Young, head of media and communications at Social Enterprise UK, said: “The #WhoKnew campaign gives the global social enterprise community a chance to tell their stories, to show what makes them different from traditional businesses and to shout about the impact of their work.”

Social Enterprise UK says that last year’s campaign reached approximately 4.3m people on Twitter and involved social enterprises from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Ghana, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Malaysia, Nepal, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Sudan and Vietnam.

The British Council is working in partnership with Social Enterprise UK to promote the campaign more widely. Adam Pillsbury, the global stakeholder manager for the British Council’s Global Social Enterprise programme, said: “We’re inviting social enterprises from around the world to take part in this campaign to mark Social Enterprise Day because it’s such an engaging, fun and effective opportunity to promote their work and raise awareness of social enterprise generally.”

Ms Young highlighted the importance of the worldwide movement of social enterprises. She said: “The challenges we all face are more connected than ever and whilst the Sustainable Development Goals offer a framework for a more equitable world, in order for the vision behind them to become a reality we need to be looking at the most innovative and the most human-centred responses to the issues they seek to address. Social enterprises are providing the solutions and they are doing so across the globe.”

She added: “Social Enterprise Day will showcase some of the thousands of businesses using the power of social enterprise to take on poverty, take on climate change and ultimately build a fairer economy.”

Ready to get involved?

To take part in Social Enterprise Day 2018, go to www.socialenterprise.org.uk/whoknew where you can download a #Whoknew poster. Print it out and write a message inside. Take a photo and share it on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, using the hashtags #Whoknew and #SocialEnterpriseDay, between Monday 12 and Thursday 15 November (although ensure you have activity on Thursday 15 November itself). Images will be added to a global album on Flickr and Facebook.

And posts don’t have to be in English, as long as you use the hashtag #SocialEnterpriseDay, it will be tracked by Social Enterprise UK, so feel free to translate #Whoknew into your own language.