Earned income from a social good
inspiration: David Bornstein
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“Each marriage is woven from different strands of love, friendship, sexual fulfillment, nurture, protection, emotional security, economic responsibility and co-parenting.” – Judith Wallernstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage |
You may have heard the term ‘social entrepreneur’, wondered what it meant and sought an answer in Wikipedia. Here is what you will find:
A social entrepreneur is someone who recognises a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organise, create, and manage a venture to make social change.
In addition to operating in a business-like way, social enterprise is also about:
- Social goods: Social enterprises provide ‘products’ that benefit both the individual consumer and others in the wider community too.
- Earned income: Rather than depend on private or government handouts, social enterprises earn income in the marketplace to sustain their organisations into the future.
David at the Skoll World Forum
To Hell With Average:
"I love profit. I love obscene profit. Because then you can then hire the world's most fantastic people, and take the most extraordinary and interesting risks known to humankind."
From Helplessness and Inaction to Social Problem-Solving
Award-winning journalist and writer David Bornstein has eloquently made the connection between our innate human need to make a contribution, to solve problems – and the lengthy list of unsolved problems that aren’t being addressed by traditional institutions, whether businesses, governments or nonprofits.
I write about people who have solutions to problems, and whose deep yearning in their lives meets the world’s deep needs. There is emotional pain associated with inaction, especially if we care about something.
More from David:
On the other hand, there is the upside of action: doing work that you find challenging and meaningful with colleagues whom you respect and care for. Social entrepreneurship offers this: the pleasure of collaboration, the feeling of satisfaction and thrill of making change happen.
From Cosmetics and Coffee to ... Marriage
Two of the best-known organisations that have applied social enterprise principles successfully are The Body Shop and FairTrade.
| Problem | ‘Old-style’ Solution | Social Enterprise Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Testing on animals of cosmetics and personal care products. | Form pressure groups, raise awareness, lobby politicians, etc. | Create a retail chain to market and sell cruelty-free products. |
| Exploitation of producers by multinational corporations. | As above. | Build an organisation to certify, label, market and distribute coffee that provides a fair return to primary producers. |
By every measure, marriage is not just a private good but a social good. Married couples live longer, healthier and more productive lives. And the children of married couples are much likely to be contributors to society rather than drains on its financial and social capital.
Marriage’s wider social dimension has always provided the state’s justification for regulating it. But, since the 1970s and 80s, state family law systems have taken over marriage to the extent that it is a state-dominated contract.
And so soon as family law took over marriage, individual citizens stopped buying the ‘marriage product’. Following the path taken by other social enterprises, WeDo Marriage intends to bring marriage back by offering a new marriage that will compete with the family law system in the marriage provision marketplace.
| Problem | ‘Old-style’ Solution | Social Enterprise Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusive control of marriage by the family law system. | Form pressure groups, raise awareness, lobby politicians, etc. | Create an organisation to offer marriage contracts outside the family law system. |
about WeDo Marriage®
Empowering couples to design and fulfil their own personalised, commitment-focused marriage contracts.
new thinking, new marriage
Open your mind to what some innovative thinkers, writers, legal scholars and academics are saying about the future of marriage.
Google's Project 10 to 100
A call from Google for ideas to change the world. Read our submission about couple marriage and the benefits it will bring.
getting down to business
We're not in the business of 'reforming' state marriage. We are a business that will compete with the state in the marriage supply market.
innovation in relationships
Cohabitation – living together – was once merely non-marriage; now, through cohabitation contracts, it is a path to a new couple marriage.
state regulation not monopoly
Almost everything in the life works because contract law works. And marriage will come back to life when it works the way other things do.
making meaning
The core of entrepreneurship is to make meaning. Companies fundamentally founded for this purpose make a difference and succeed.-
social enterprise
Social enterprises earn their income by providing products and services that benefit both consumers and the wider community too. 
media page
News about WeDo Marriage Limited: an updated archive of our press releases, media interviews, blog reviews and articles.
contact us
Got a comment or a question about WeDo Marriage? We can't hear what you don't say.
Feel free to get in touch.
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“When we fall in love, we feel whole, we feel like ourselves. For a while we are able to relax; it looks like everything is going to turn out all right, after all. But inevitably, things start to go wrong. In some cases, all hell breaks loose. It seems that our partners are different than we thought they were. We begin to see qualities that we can't bear. Our dream shatters. Since our partners are no longer willingly giving us what we need, we change tactics, trying to manoeuver them into caring – through anger, crying, withdrawal, shame, intimidation, and criticism – whatever works.” – Harville Hendrix and Helen Lakelly Hunt, Getting the Love You Want. |
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