A talk given by Siddee Majubah of Liver World Community Sports at the Basis Project South East Region conference, October 2010. You can view more presentations from the conference on the Basis Project website.

Edited transcript

Siddee Mujabah, Liver World Community Sports – Speaking at the Basis Project  South East Region Conference, October 2010

I am not a professional in social enterprise, I am someone who is new to social enterprise but I will share my experience so far with you today.

We have a small community organisation called Liver World Community Sports. We organise multi-cultural football tournaments… to bring all the different ethnic communities and local people in Liverpool together. The project is owned by refugees and local people.

In the Kensington area where we are based and a lot of refugees have been settled, there was some concern and fear among the white population. We decided we wanted to take a group of young people – especially white young people – on a trip to Africa. Getting funding for such a trip was really difficult but we managed to raise about £9,000 to take 10 young people to Gambia.

When we came back it made a huge impact on the community and people were asking if we could do another trip with different young people. We said that it was difficult to raise the money and it was at this point that people started suggesting that we should form a Community Interest Company (CIC) or social enterprise.

I came up with the idea, since we are living in quite a poor community, of setting up a second-hand shop.  We registered as a company limited by guarantee, to allow us to trade and got the insurance and opened the second-hand shop.

We started off thinking of it as a social enterprise but some people told us that we should register as a charity, because it is easier for people and firms to donate if you have a charity number. And someone else said that being a charity means that you are properly set-up with all the right paperwork.

So we thought that if it was the best way to get more funding we would pay for someone to come in and help us set up as a charity. We are already calling ourselves a ‘charity shop’ so that it’s easy for people to know what we are doing. We have found that people aren’t too sure what a social enterprise is, so that’s another reason why we are going to register as a charity.

We have been lucky in that our landlord has let us pay less than the full rent and we are trying to recruit as many volunteers as possible.

At an event on social enterprise I learned the importance of modelling costs and revenues, and at the moment we are starting to see some profits.

The other thing that we were advised to do was to spend money that we raised before the end of the financial year, to minimise tax.