Our Scope: Supporting Social Businesses
SOW Asia supports social businesses that strive to make a difference to society while generating self-sustaining revenue. We look for organizations that create social / environmental impact in a sustainable and scalable way. These organizations have good management, high ethical standards and the long-term potential to grow and flourish.
The chart below shows our area of investment focus as it relates to traditional charities that are impact only and traditional businesses that are profit maximizing:
Social businesses include a wide spectrum of models:
- Ventures created to provide employment opportunities for marginalized individuals
- Non-profit organizations operating an income-generating venture to decrease their reliance on grant funding
- Profit-generating ventures that provide important products or services, and in doing so generate positive social / environmental value
SOW Asia works to empower that third category of social business – organizations whose primary objective is to create social / environmental impact on a self-sustaining basis through commercial activity.
We efficiently pool together the necessary financing, knowledge and networks to increase the viability of social businesses so they are able to:
- Address challenges beyond the reach of existing resources
- Use market approaches to tackle social / environmental challenges
- Generate revenue to reach financial sustainability
- Create and articulate success with social / environmental impact measurements
