Doing Business Differently
Greetings from Leith's main aims are:
- To provide work and volunteer positions to people from dis-advantaged social groups.
- To produce a range of ethical and hand crafted greetings cards that will challenge an industry which is predominantly mass produced in China.
- To encourage traditional and modern arts and crafts within society in the form of workshops, open days and exhibitions.
- To promote the use of re-cycled materials, up-cycling, and products that are not mass produced.
- To spread the social enterprise philosophy of a not just for profit business attitude.
Social Change
It has been our aim from the beginning to provide work for people from socially dis-advantaged back grounds. In India, there are communities of women crafters that make Fairtrade products for a decent wage and these goods are then distributed around the world. To produce our cards, Greetings from Leith use a similar business model to this and it is our objective to provide flexible, fairly paid and creative work for people that can not work a normal 9-5 job.
What is a social enterprise?
Social enterprise is still a relatively an unknown term. A social enterprise is social mission driven organisation which applys market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. The movement includes both non-profits that use business models to pursue their mission and for-profits whose primary purposes are social. Our aim, to accomplish targets that are social and or environmental as well as financial, this is often referred to as the triple bottom line. Many commercial businesses would consider themselves to have social objectives, but social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose remains central to their operation.
