The streets of San Francisco

So here I am in sunny San Francisco for the  Social Enterprise World Forum. It would be easy to whittle on about the undulating streets ( they are indeed steeper than they ever appear in the films or photos)  or I could paint a literary picture of the Atlantic fog obscuring Alcatraz and the Golden gate bridge. All of these things are very striking and on my first afternoon in the city these are the things that I took in.

But over those first four or five hours in this sunny city there was another impression I was forming, something that little by little, like a creeping migraine, was subtly affecting me.

Barbara is 59, though looks well into her 70′s – she wears a sock puppet on her left hand and holds a Starbucks paper cup in her right.

At 2pm, 5pm and 10pm there she was, right outside my hotel offering to raise a smile for whatever donation was offered.

Of course you can find striking inequality in virtually every developed city in the world but Barbara was not alone. There were many, many more people than I had been used to seeing, perhaps 25 or more within 100m of my hotel entrance; many disabled, mostly black, and all I concluded considerably younger than their years suggested.

It made me recall 10 years ago when things weren’t so different in London. There is still much work to be done, but social enterprises and charities working alongside Government and other initiatives are turning that situation around.

I am in no way suggesting that San Francisco or the USA has a unique problem. On the flight over I began a book called “Unequal Britain” by Pat Thane which documents the rise in inequality over the last 60 years in the UK.  The book  damns our own society and is a further call to action for those committed to social justice. However, here in San Francisco, there seems to be a broadly held opinion from those I’ve met that this level of homelessness and street begging is inevitable, unstoppable collateral damage from a free society.

It made me realise that we in the social enterprise movement have our work cut out for us to show people that there is no reason to be accepting of such daily injustices. There are solutions out there to so many things that too many of us view as unfortunate, maybe, but just the way things are.

Too often social enterprise is seen as an interesting adjunct  to the mainstream way of doing business, something on the periphery, a cheap and effective way of fixing market failures. But perhaps the biggest market failure of under-regulated capitalism is the rampaging and increasing inequalities found across the developed and developing world.  At the world forum we’ll be looking at how we move social enterprise from the margins to the mainstream not just nationally but globally too.

The Forum starts  today so I’ll be sure to report back after day one.