Third sector perspectives versus business sense: one charity's quest for social enterprise to help London' homeless

This practice paper sets out to understand the failure of one charity's quest to establish a social enterprise, reaching, as it did, for a solution without understanding how or even whether social enterprises would help the charity's beneficiaries. Ultimately a social business has been established at the charity's premises, but by an external organisation thinking quite differently from its host. The paper concludes with lessons for other organisations considering social enterprise activity.