What is a social enterprise?

Everybody wants to be a social enterprise nowadays. For-profit companies are getting in on the act. Foundation trusts are apparently social enterprises. Healthwatch boards are required by law to be social enterprises. Even the august editor-in-chief of Civil Society Media has been known to mention that he thinks we might be a social enterprise*.

Now two of the most traditional and respectable of the sector’s several thousand umbrella bodies have got in on the act. The NCVO thinks it is a social enterprise and Acevo is the best voice for social enterprises.

“Today is our new @ncvo #ncvotogether strategy. And the last day we receive a core grant. http://ncvo.org/strat19  We’re def now a #socent!”, tweeted Karl Wilding, director of public policy at the NCVO, earlier this week.

You can tell the social enterprise lot are pretty sharp when it comes to drumming up support. Not ten minutes later, Nick Temple, business director at Social Enterprise UK, had been in touch on Twitter suggesting that NCVO become a member.

Not to be outdone by its neighbours, Acevo launched a fancy new website this week, declaring it is “the leading voice of the UK's charity and social enterprise sector”.

Soon we’ll have the Directory of Social Enterprise Change or the Institute of 'Funds and Loans' raising.

*We aren’t.

Pig on a stick

Police and firefighters in Warwickshire organised a boxing match recently to raise cash for the charity Get A Head.

Sadly, there’s always got to be one person who takes things too literally, and in this case it was the firefighter who turned up in the ring with a severed pig’s head.

You can picture the conversation. “No, Bill, it’s a charity for head and neck diseases; it’s a joke, mate, a pun, a play on words. You don’t actually have to get a real head.”

“Nah, mate, it’s because the police are nicknamed the pigs, you see. It’ll go down really well. They’ll see the funny side. And we can have it for dinner afterwards.”

Sadly a fresh cod would have been a more appropriate choice of metaphor for the unfortunate firefighter. Apparently he got battered.

Clowns calling

The RSPCA has revealed a list of its silliest calls, to mark an increase in calls to its 24-hour cruelty telephone of over 50 per cent since 2011.

In the last three months calls have ranged from someone thinking they saw a monkey in a rabbit suit, to an offended dog-owner who felt that someone’s reference to their cross-breed pet as a ‘mongrel’ was offensive.

Perhaps most bizarrely was a call from an individual concerned that the rat they had found in their kitchen was unwell. The RSPCA turned up to discover that the rat in question was in fact an onion.

Cat nap

One of the joys of charity shops is coming home with an unexpected bargain, but one couple got little more than they were expecting when their new sofa started miaowing. Pauline and Bill Lowe’s moggy, Crocket, had taken refuge inside a three-seater sofa before it was donated to the St Luke’s Hospice charity shop in Grays Essex.

He was discovered by the sofa’s new owners, who wish to remain anonymous, when they heard a miaow sound and then saw a claw poking through the fabric. The sofa had to be ripped apart to free Crocket, who has now been reunited with his owners.

Let’s hope they got a refund.