Social Traders has been building a thriving social enterprise sector since 2008. Social enterprises are businesses like any other, but they exist to intentionally address social or environmental challenges.
As a leading social enterprise industry body for 16 years, we have worked with over 900 social enterprises and have strong relationships across government, philanthropy, corporate Australia and the for-purpose sector.
Over our first decade, we delivered broad services for the social enterprise sector including impact investment, start-up accelerators, sector research, capacity building, advocacy and the annual sector conference and awards.
In 2017 we pivoted our model to focus on social procurement as the best mechanism to unlock trade revenue for social enterprises. We successfully built a national social enterprise procurement market. We supported over 300 of Australia’s largest businesses and four state governments to build social enterprises into their supply chains. We catalysed $843m in contracts with social enterprises over six years.
This year we set a new strategy for our third phase of growth. We will strengthen our role as a leading social enterprise industry body and Australia’s certifier of social enterprises. We will expand our support for business to wider services in social responsibility and ESG, while scaling social procurement to unlock $5.5 billion in demand for social enterprises. We will use our unique impact data to deliver new services and stronger advocacy.
We are a national organisation with 35 staff across four states. We support and connect a community of 4,500 people across social enterprise, business and government. One of our values is ‘bold trailblazing’ - our ambition is to make ‘business for good’, business as usual.