Charity or Social enterprise???

£1000 for Donald Trump . . .nothing, £1000 for Bill Gates . . . peanuts, £1000 for me might as well be a million. Similar to me £1000 for C.R.E.A.T.I.V. and its members seemed like £1,000,000 when we found out that’s what we needed in the bank to be able to establish our self as a charity, oh and let’s not forget the paper work.

So, pertaining to our last meeting we were left deciding that we would be a company that generated profits and gave about 85% of our profits to our chosen charity. Does anybody else want to puke? Well I did, not because it was a bad idea but because of the word ‘profits’, it just sounded so wrong. To the point that our Co-D was like ‘cant we just put 100% of our profits into our venture’ but everyone knows a business has to be sustainable in the long term so it wasn’t going to happen. At that moment it felt like becoming a ‘social enterprise’ was our best bet particularly because of bureaucracy and legalities. So I left our meeting feeling somewhere in the pits of my soul sad and dejected and feeling like I was slowly being sucked into the capitalist regime I so hated when I wanted to be 100% philanthropic. I probably sound like some loser desperate to show myself worthy and needing to do something good. Well maybe I am but the intention was to give back and have fun while doing it and a business just didn’t sound as fun.

Anyway, the next step was seeing someone in the Harrow in Business Centre about how to move forward with our new ‘business’. Ewwww! Sorry! So I saw Mr. A and told him our plan to become a business. We talked and talked and talked some more and finally he said ‘when you turn everything on its head what is the aim of C.R.E.A.T.I.V.?’ to which I replied ‘to give back, to help, to show a positive Africa through the Arts, it’s not about money for us’ to which he replied ‘be resourceful then £1000 is nothing!’ And as he said those words they hit me like a slap in the face ‘BE RESOURCEFUL! BE RESOURCEFUL!’ So here I am being resourceful thinking how C.R.E.A.T.I.V can get creative and make £1000 by September. I’m still not sure how we’ll do it but what I do know is that with the help of our friends, family and all those C.R.E.A.T.I.V. minds out there, we’ll make something out of nothing, something random and unexpected, and after all we are C.R.E.A.T.I.V.

;-)