Social Entrepreneur Place:
A Founding Partner in Open Hiring UK
Our Story
Social Entrepreneur Place Ltd is a UK social enterprise founded and led by Karen Leigh Anderson. Incorporated with a clear social mission embedded in its objects clause, the company exists to strengthen social enterprises and entrepreneurs who are building businesses that change lives – particularly those focused on employment, inclusion, and enterprise-led impact.
Karen brings more than thirty years of business experience to this work, spanning an early corporate career in South Africa with IBM, Grant Thornton, InvestecBank, and Oracle, through to working in technology consulting in London and Cambridge before starting her two decades embedded in the UK social enterprise ecosystem. Since 2003, she has supported more than 1,000 organisations – directly and through various support programmes with institutions including UnLtd, Cambridge Judge Business School’s Cambridge Social Ventures and various social enterprise networks.
Open Hiring UK is a natural culmination of that career – but its roots go back further than might be immediately apparent, and they are deeply personal. Karen’s interest in employment-led social enterprise stretches back to her earliest work with Social Firms – organisations whose legal mission is to create jobs for those furthest from the labour market. That interest was deepened significantly by her Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, which took her across eight US states to interview more than ninety senior leaders investigating how social enterprises achieve lasting scale and legacy. Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York – the originator of Open Hiring – was one of the organisations Karen visited during that trip. She attended a celebration of Open Hiring at Greyston, encountering the model in its home and understanding first-hand what it means to build a business whose entire purpose is to give the next person on the list a chance. The Greyston principle is disarmingly simple: we don’t hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies to hire people.
Karen’s Churchill Fellowship report, Building 100 Years of Impact, explored how organisations like Goodwill have employed millions of people over more than a century – and what UK social entrepreneurs could learn from that endurance. Core to the report is that employment, built on trade and sustained through mission-driven culture, is the most transformative thing a social enterprise can offer. Open Hiring is a great example of doing just that by removing the gatekeeping that keeps the most excluded people out of work, and it does so while delivering measurable business benefits to employers.
In early 2016, Karen introduced Jos Verhoeven – the founder of Start Foundation in the Netherlands – to Greyston Bakery. Start Foundation went on to become the European pioneer of Open Hiring, launching the first implementation outside the United States in 2018, developing the model over eight years with government support, independent academic research, and a growing network of Dutch employers. This Open Hiring UK Project is the next step in that decade long journey.