Social entrepreneurship: concepts and signs

Abstract

The article is devoted to social entrepreneurship, i.e. entrepreneurial activity aimed at positive innovative changes in society, namely, mitigating or solving social problems at the expense of income received from one’s own activity. In Ukraine, a separate organizational and legal form is not provided for the implementation of a social enterprise. That is, you can organize a social enterprise in any convenient of various forms (civil society organizations, business entities, etc.), with a wide choice of available taxation regimes. Social enterprises are designed to meet the needs of community members that the public sector cannot meet, and the private sector ignores. This is precisely the niche for the activity of social enterprises. Local communities are the main beneficiaries of the development of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship helps to provide public services in a new way and meet the needs of the community; create jobs; enrich the professional experience of people working in social enterprises for further employment under modern market conditions; to develop communities by involving them in public life socially vulnerable and marginalized population groups, providing their members with work; to expand the activity of citizens who can independently solve their problems and take responsibility for their lives; increase attention to socially disadvantaged population groups, not so much by providing them with charitable assistance, but by providing them with useful socially significant work; revive rural and urban areas and improve their social infrastructure, etc.
 It is indicated that social entrepreneurship plays an important role in the mechanism of realization of constitutional rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen, in particular, the right to work, to a sufficient standard of living, to equality, to social protection of a new format. In this case, we believe that the concept of social protection should be interpreted broadly, go beyond exclusively state obligations (pensions, other social benefits), and include a model of responsible entrepreneurship. It can be argued that social entrepreneurship is an important step towards the departure from collectivism and the transition to individualism, where legal entities and natural persons-entrepreneurs create decent conditions for the life of socially vulnerable segmentsof the population through their activities on their own initiative.