This year, Social Enterprise Day falls on 20th November 2025. It’s a fantastic day to celebrate the transformative work we all do as social enterprises to make the world a better place – one individual, family and community at a time. This year, we’d like to give a great big Social Enterprise Day Shoutout to some AMAZING Birmingham social enterprises transforming local lives…
Hello – we’re Beacon Family Services CIC! We’re based in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham 👋
On this special day we’d like to thank our amazing team for their commitment and impact because we’re a social enterprise, too! Our mission here at Beacon Family Services is to provide the best free and funded care to all families including adoptive families. We’re specialists in helping parents and children connect and thrive in a proven and impactful way through play-based therapy. Our social impact report for 2024 shows the fruits of our labour, with over 2,000 children reached through our services, and 79p of every £1 invested in family support. Now it’s time to raise a cuppa to all the OTHER amazing social enterprises in Birmingham. It’s important to support each other, because we all know our services work best when we join the dots. Together, we can help each other to support people in need!
Our Big Brum Social Enterprise Day Shoutout goes to…
(in alphabetical order; you’re all amazing)
Communitea Cafe, Boldmere Road, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham 🙌
This lovely cafe is where we send families for a cup of tea after Parenting with Theraplay® and other play-based therapy sessions at our play space. The Communitea Cafe hosts a wide range of community-led events and inclusive activities delivered in partnership with volunteers and local organisations. Its mission is to promote wellbeing and social connection – and the cake is great, too! We thoroughly recommend it!
GROW Family Support, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham 🙌
This wonderful organisation provides a SEND support network led by SEND parents for SEND parents. It’s a safe, inclusive and empowering space for parents and carers to connect, share, learn, and grow together. What this parent-led network does is so important, and of great value to its community.
Highbury Orchard Community, Birmingham 🙌
This green-fingered and big-hearted organisation is part of the Refugee Resettlement Working Group. Based in Birmingham, it provides an urban permaculture orchard with the aim to grow not only food but also community and connection. It was established as a CIC (that’s a type of social enterprise, if you weren’t sure) in 2012. Here at Beacon Family Services, we recognise the deep-rooted value of nurturing parent-child connection through outdoor activities, and applaud the Highbury Orchard Community for the positive local impact they achieve through their work.
The Moseley Hive, Moseley, Birmingham 🙌
The Moseley Hive is an absolutely amazing community-led enterprise organisation based in Moseley, South Birmingham. They hosted our Ukrainian family Theraplay® groups last year as part of our Project Salam campaign supporting Ukrainian, Dari, Pashto, and Arabic-speaking refugee families in Birmingham. We joined forces to lift the spirits and build connection for Ukrainian families in collaboration with Moseley for Ukraine. You know what they say… teamwork makes the dream work. That phrase may be an oldie, but it’s still a goodie.
Miss Macaroon, Birmingham 🙌
It’s not the first time we’ve mentioned sweet treats in this shoutout, and that’s because delicious nibbles are very dear to our hearts (along with people who have made it their business mission to help others). Miss Macaroon bake our very favourite macaroons, using their bakery expertise to cook up a bright future for young people, too. In fact, Miss Macaroon reinvest 100% of profits into helping unemployed young people build skills that will help to change their lives. Doesn’t knowing that make those macaroons taste even better?
Our Place Support, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham 🙌
The Our Place community hub is brilliant and much needed. Their worthwhile goal is to help people navigate a wide range of difficulties in life and achieve longterm change. Along with many other social enterprises and non-profit organisations, we love using their community space to work with families in need of our services. In fact, their community hub has helped us to grow our services. Working with grant funding can bring short term projects, and the Our Place hub’s flexible working spaces mean we can grow easily in line with our projects. It’s just one powerful example of how social enterprises can work in synergy to help funding stretch further and support even more people in Birmingham and beyond!
Refugee Alliance, inner city Birmingham and areas including Alum Rock, Saltley, Lozells, Small Heath, Northfield and Erdington 🙌
We had the pleasure of working with Refugee Alliance closely when we first initiated Project Salam to help refugee families in Birmingham. They provide refugees, asylum seekers, newly arrived families resettling in the UK and those from settled communities in the UK, with education and opportunities to help enhance their quality of life in the UK. Their support includes education, employability skills, life skills and wellbeing. They’ve spent the last five years working with families in Birmingham and their dedication and commitment is second to none!
Join us in celebrating these amazing social enterprises in Birmingham. The work they do matters.
Social enterprises – why funding matters
Funding is critical to any social enterprise. Including ours! Driven by our mission, we sometimes self-fund services for families because we know how important our work is to the parents and children in our network. As a business, we rely on funding because we require financial resources to operate and grow sustainably in a way that provides the biggest social impact possible in line with our resources.
We achieve fantastic results and save the NHS millions of pounds every year. This is made possible due to funding from generous organisations including the Sutton Coldfield Charitable Trust, who fund our Play Attention programmes, Adoption England, who fund Al Coates’ peer support group for adoptive parents living with CCVAB, and the National Lottery.
Funding is not guaranteed. Social enterprises like ours have to evidence our value and impact to show that the money is being spent well. In times of challenge, there is not enough funding for all the great organisations and projects out there.
How can you help?
Visit our funders and commissioners hub. There, you can read our social impact report, and inform us of potential funding opportunities to continue and expand our work.
Support and share on social media. If you spot services or insights we offer that might be of interest to your own online community groups and social networks, please do spread the word. It supports a positive ecosystem where more people can get to know and use the services we provide, helping organisations like ourse to be funded to provide further support in the years to come.
Become a Supporter Member: If your organisation isn’t a social enterprise but wants to support the movement, you can join Social Enterprise UK as a Supporter Member to help the sector and gain access to a network of partners.
Advocate: Write to your local MP asking them support initiatives that benefit the sector, such as investing dormant assets in social enterprises and community businesses like ours!
Celebrate #SocialEnterpriseDay on 20th November 2025!