Check out the guide we created on the Impact Initiative.

This is a guide all about impact-led business and social enterprise. Social enterprise is one way of delivering impact through business that you can have in your toolkit of delivering impact.

Use the guide to think about if social enterprise is the right approach for your business idea, and understand where social enterprise fits in the context of New Zealand’s economy.

Start thinking about how to design your business model to deliver positive impact!

Use this tool to:

• Understand different business models that are commonly used in social enterprise.

• Understand when each one would be most effective to deliver positive impact.

Download the guide here

There is no specific legal structure for social enterprise in New Zealand. However, there are ways of getting around this.

The most common options for registering are:

• Limited Liability Company
• Limited Liability Company with Charitable Trust
• Charitable Trust

Before getting into deciding a legal structure, make sure you are at a stage where it makes sense to register, for example, you have proven your product or service is something people want, and that your intended impact will be positive.

Then, take a look at the pros and cons of different legal structures. The options will be different depending on things like how you intend to operate, governance, how you might raise funding, and long term plans for your social enterprise.

For more general information, check out this free tool from Ākina: A guide to legal structures for impact-led organisations

The Social Lean Canvas was created in 2014 by Rowan Yeoman, Dave Moskovitz and the Ākina Foundation. It is adapted from Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas which is in turn adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Who should be using the canvas?

This Canvas is a great tool for you if you are a social enterprise, an impact-led business or a charity developing a revenue generating arm. We will be using the term ‘business’ to refer to all of these scenarios in our instructions.

Download the Canvas and find more information here

Set out on the right foot and get ready to make sustainable impact!

Use this tool to understand:

• What might be needed to start your social enterprise.

• Your obligations for starting up a business.

• How to start thinking about impact and how it fits in.

• Who can help, and where they are.

Download the checklist here

Learn how businesses have shifted ot a Social Enterprise model here.

For anyone starting out with an idea, we've recently worked with Business.govt.nz to develop a series of tools for impact businesses to get started and grow. We developed these tools in the hopes of helping lots of Kiwi entrepreneurs and founders to develop and progress their ideas, in an accessible way.

Starting or growing a purpose-led business takes money. If you need more than you have, you could consider getting an investment. Investment is someone giving money to a business in return for profit.

Find out how to decide on investment here

Check out the Legal opinion on use of funds for Impact Investing that Ākina was addressed in. This was created by ParryField Lawyers.

In the past, Trustees thought about how the income that came from the capital they invested could be used to do good. The new Trusts Act 2019 (the Act) lets us reframe this – it references the purpose of the Trust itself and the need to bear that in mind when investing. This means that Trustees should also look at where they invest capital and how it advances the purpose and has impact, as well as what to do with the income.

Read more here