" Third sector organisations contribute strongly to building our communities and are a rich source of talent and ideas. The sector already employs more than 80,000 paid staff and draws on thousands of volunteers. People who are unemployed or unable to undertake full-time work can use opportunities in this sector to reconnect with their communities and gain valuable skills and experience. The Government is working closely with the sector to ensure this happens.
" The Government is committing over $4 million over the next four years to support the work of social entrepreneurs — people who possess the skills, energy and insight to make a real difference in their communities. By giving these people better training and support, we will ensure that they make an even greater contribution to their communities. "
— Steve Maharey, Minister of Social Services and Employment, from "Where For Welfare? Social Development And The Refurbishment Of The Welfare State" speech 6 June 2001 to the Sydney Institute, Sydney, Australia.

" We will be backing thousands of "social entrepreneurs", those people who bring to social problems the same enterprise and imagination that business entrepreneurs bring to wealth creation. There are people on every housing estate who have it in themselves to be community leaders — the policeman who turns young people away from crime, the person who sets up a leisure centre, the local church leaders who galvanise the community to improve schools and build health centres...
— Tony Blair, British Prime Minister , from his first policy speech as PM, given on the Aylesbury Estate, London, 2 June 1997

" We don't need to turn businessmen into social workers … any more than we need to turn social services into cut-throat business entities.
" The missing element here is what could be described as the social entrepreneurs. These are the people who can make hope possible in the face of stuckness, uncertainty and despair..."
— Vivian Hutchinson, from his speech at the launch of the NZ Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, Christchurch, April 2000.

" In the past, the welfare and corporate sectors were regarded as mutually exclusive. Welfare workers were deeply suspicious of the involvement of businesses in community development projects and likewise, the corporate world had little time for the values of social work.
" The evidence suggests that social entrepreneurs have a unique capacity for bridging this divide. In the process, they have been highly successful in dealing with the new challenges of poverty. They have found fresh solutions to social exclusion, solutions that appear to be beyond the capacity of the welfare and business sectors operating in isolation ..."
— Mark Latham, Australian Labour MP for Werriwa, and co-editor of "The Enabling State" (2001)

" Without question, the most exciting work today is not creating another business (there are over 100 million in the world), but what is called "social entrepreneurship", the extraordinary act of bringing people together to transform the institutions that rule, harm, and overwhelm the nature of human existence and our relationship to living systems ..."
— Paul Hawken, author of "Natural Capitalism" (1999), from his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of "Small is Beautiful — Economics as if People Mattered" by E.F. Schumacher

" Voluntary civic society organisations are now recognised as a new "third sector" in all economies. Indeed in the drive to reshape the global economy and redesign its institutions, civic society is the primary source of social innovation.
" With our local experience, common wisdom and systems approach, we can review the many levels from global to local. We can identify many of the new policies, programs, social interventions and innovations most likely to reshape a global economy aligned with principles of fairness, democracy, human development and ecological sustainability ..."
— Hazel Henderson, author of" Beyond Globalization "(2000)

"If you give a man a fish ... you feed him for a day.
"If you teach him how to fish ... you feed him forever."
— proverb

" Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish, or to teach how to fish.
" They will not rest until they have revolutionized the whole fishing industry ..."
— Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

" Public services are suffused with a "can't do" culture. When Mrs Thatcher came to power, they were frequently paralysed by strikes and union obstruction. Now, they are just paralysed. The Tories set the private sector free, but locked the public sector in chains.
" It was not always thus. Think of how speedily the Wilson government got the Open University going in the 1960s; think further back to the establishment of the BBC and to the success of municipal authorities in gas and water supply. Labour's challenge is to re-establish a sense of pride, purpose and dynamism in public services, to liberate them as decisively as Mrs Thatcher liberated the private sector, to make social and civic enterprise as much a magnet for young talent as London City or e-commerce..."
—New Statesman editorial, 27th November 2000

" Socially entrepreneurial organisations are like social test beds. They offer rare opportunities to conduct practical research and develop social policies. We need to find ways of leveraging the lessons learned in these organisations by transferring their best practice to the public sector."
— Charles Leadbeater, Demos think-tank