Heart

About us

About us

Heart is a non-profit, social enterprise accelerator, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Our objective is to speed up the time to market and fast track the success of social enterprises with high impact, high growth potential. We provide advisory services and business support to entrepreneurs across all phases of development. Our overarching purpose is to identify, nurture and scale up South Africa’s most talented social entrepreneurs.

Please visit our website for more information: www.weloveheart.co.za

About social entrepreneurship

We define a social enterprise as an organisation that addresses a specific social or environmental problem and sustains its activities by earning income through trading products or services. The central objective of the social enterprise is to contribute positively to social or environmental change. The organisation is cause driven, not just for profit.

A social entrepreneur is someone who endeavours to combine the value-creating capacity of entrepreneurship with the humanitarian mindset of philanthropy in order to drive social change in a financially sustainable way.

Fuelling growth through grants

Given their limited financial and operational track record, social enterprises in the early stages of development do not qualify for traditional commercial funding channels. The vast majority of social enterprises seek to create sustainable solutions at the bottom of the pyramid. They operate in poor markets and generally employ unqualified, disadvantaged people. Furthermore, in the early stages of development social enterprises do not have the financial strength to bear the cost of professional incubation, consulting or acceleration services. To optimize their chances of success, it is therefore essential to provide start up social enterprises with grants.