The social entrepreneurship concept in modern Russian reality

Over the past two decades significant changes underwent in the political, economic and social life of thecountry. Significant transformations have affected all sectors of the society: the public sector has transformed, it departed from the principles ofmonopoly control of the social sphere and the industrial sector; a fundamentally new private sector has formed, an independent third sector isforming in the emerging civil society. Thus, in the past two decades, three relatively independent sectors were built in Russia and there was arethink of the principles of management of social issues that require understanding of cross-sector cooperation and developing partnership arrangementsof the state, business and NGOs. Сross-sector social partnership is a perfect triangle of relations between the three subjects of socialpolicy, which are equally prepared for cross-sector cooperation. Now it is accepted that the weakest party in this triangle is the non-profit sector.It should be noted that throughout the last decade, forming of the Russian non-profit sector was of "spontaneous" nature, but today the NGOapproached the critical point where the knowledge and professionalism have become the decisive factor in achieving goals. An important questionof the functioning of modern non-profit organizations is the issue of funding, on which not only its current position, but also its future developmentdepends. The peculiarity of funding non-profit organizations is multi-revenue, which, on the one hand, ensures the independence,but, on the other hand, leads to the unstable nature of funding; permanently limited funds and scarcity of material resources. Despite the apparentdiversity of potential sources of funding, they can be divided into three parts: internal (Russian) sources of funding, foreign aid, and activityof the third sector. In terms of this, qualitative and quantitative growth of precedents of using technologies of social entrepreneurship by NGOsbecomes really important. It is obvious that social enterprises are useful both for direct beneficiaries, and for the state and NGOs. The search forsustainable mechanisms to solve social problems has been conducted for a long time. It is quite possible that the social enterprise as one of thesemechanisms has the right to exist. Nevertheless, the situation today is that the concept of social entrepreneurship is realized by representatives ofthe third sector on an intuitive level that indicates the presence of an acute need for theoretical understanding of this phenomenon and practicaladaptation of technologies of social entrepreneurship to the modern Russian society. In this article the author attempts to systematize the existingtheoretical approaches to understanding the essence of social entrepreneurship, make a clear distinction between this phenomenon, charity andsocial responsibility, as well as explore possibilities for practical application of technologies of social entrepreneurship in the activities of thenon-profit sector.

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