Update your diary with our 2025 events list | How to be a brilliant social enterprise employer
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This week’s headlines from the pioneers of social entrepreneurship, impact investing and mission-driven business around the world
10 JANUARY 2025
How Mexico's waste pickers are getting decent, green economy jobs
Join Pioneers Post reporter David Lyons in Oaxaca state, Mexico, as he learns about how NGO SiKanda is supporting informal waste pickers to professionalise, set up enterprises and improve their communities’ waste management.
Social enterprise and impact investing events in 2025
Planning for 2025? Don't book your diary without checking the newly updated Pioneers Post roundup of social impact events – for social entrepreneurs, impact investors and all those working within the global impact economy.
How to be a brilliant social enterprise employer: Make flexible working the default
Offering flexible working can give social enterprises a competitive advantage in the race to recruit the best employees – even if they can’t offer the highest rates of pay and benefits. Our webinar examined how to make it work for both employers and employees.
THE EDITOR’S POST
It isn’t often my kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, reminds me of Mexico, even less so when the temperature is struggling to rise above zero degrees and there’s snow outside the window.
But on Monday morning, as I was eating breakfast and getting ready to go back to work after the holidays, the teetering tower of cardboard boxes, food packaging and wrapping paper waiting to be recycled after Christmas caught my attention.
The recycling mountain took me right back to the last piece of work I did in 2024 and straight to San Lorenzo Cacaotepec in Oaxaca state, Mexico. There I reported on the municipality’s waste disposal centre, operated by a team of workers including many who used to pick through landfill sites for valuable materials to sell on.
People who pick through litter are referred to pejoratively across Mexico as “pepenadores” and are some of the country’s most stigmatised and excluded people. Their daily search through other people’s trash puts them at high risk of injury or infection.
But, thanks to the intervention of Oaxacan NGO SiKanda, the workers in San Lorenzo Cacaotepec have professionalised as “recicladores”. They now have proper health and safety, are respected members of their community and are paid fairly for their work.
Víctor Ortiz is the director of ecology for San Lorenzo Cacaotepec municipality and technical advisor for the waste management centre. He emphasised to me that the enterprise has tackled the stigma the workers previously faced, increased the respect of their labour rights and improved the municipality’s waste management.
Ortiz said: “The community has a positive perception of this entire project and they no longer see recyclers as something dirty, as something associated with garbage. The conception changed because now they recognise that their work is very important, that the work they do is as important as a doctor does, as a professor does, because they are helping to prevent an environmental problem, which is the issue of urban solid waste.”
I reported on the San Lorenzo Cacaotepec waste disposal centre for episode three of our Good Stories podcast series, as part of our coverage of Latimpacto’s Impact Minds 2024 conference. You can listen to the full podcast, including interviews with the San Lorenzo Cacaotepec recicladores and Jose Carlos Leon Vargas, general director of SiKanda, here.
Through the Good Stories podcast we aim to bring you insights and inspiration directly from social entrepreneurs around the world. Episode one took me to the Isle of Skye in the Highlands of Scotland, to voyage on a historic ferry run by an award-winning social enterprise. In episode two, Pioneers Post reporter Estelle Uba visited circular economy pioneer i-did in Den Haag, the Netherlands.
Please subscribe to Pioneers Post wherever you get your podcasts to keep up with Good Stories, as well as our other podcasts, including Good Leaders and new series the Good Leaders Clinic.
Good Stories episode three transported me from freezing cold Scotland to a baking hot Mexican hillside, and I hope the series is able to bring you with us. Pioneers Post is keen to work with partners to produce more Good Stories from across the impact community, so if you’d like to host us and/or sponsor an episode in 2025, please get in touch and let us know your story.
DAVID LYONS
Multimedia Reporter
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Calling this year’s top women in social enterprise!
The search has begun for the 100 most inspiring women in social enterprise and impact investing across the UK.
Nominations close at midnight on Sunday 16 February 2025.
MORE HIGHLIGHTS
The tools and insight you need to do good business, better
The Good Leaders Clinic Episode 1: 'Taking the leap' with Kerrie Jones, founder CEO of Orri
Tim West and Liam Black invite purposeful business leaders to open up about their real-life issues in our new podcast series. First on the “couch”, Kerrie Jones, founding CEO of Orri, talks about the challenges of turning her vision into messy reality.
SEEN ONLINE
"“For all the hoopla of recent years, impact investing has yet to sweep the foundation world”"
Impact investing gets the ‘most heat, least fire’ award from Inside Philanthropy, which points out that the vast majority of US philanthropy’s US$1.5tn in assets remain invested in conventional ways.
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