By Dr Elizabeth Gardiner

On 16 September, I had the privilege of giving the annual Muhammad Yunus Lecture at Glasgow Caledonian University. To be invited to speak in honour of a man who reimagined the relationship between poverty, enterprise, and dignity was deeply humbling. It was also an opportunity to share the interim findings of the WISE (Women in Social Enterprise) research — findings that suggest the models of leadership we urgently need already exist, even if our systems fail to recognise them.

I come to this work after four decades in socially engaged practice. I began as a drama teacher but was soon drawn into community creativity and activism, co-founding Fablevision and later Fablevision Studios. Looking back, I now see that my work has always been about people and communities telling their own stories and shaping their own futures. In this, I feel close to the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, who understood cultural planning as the interdependence of folk, work, and place.

The WISE research, funded by Social Investment Scotland through the Scottish Government’s Social Enterprise Action Plan, gave me the chance to interview sixteen women leading social enterprises across Scotland — from urban and rural contexts, and from diverse ethnic, social, and ability backgrounds. Their voices, more than mine, were at the centre of my lecture.

Beyond the Heroic Model

I began by noting that the Doomsday Clock now stands at 87 seconds to midnight. Climate crisis accelerates, inequality widens, and the so-called “heroic” model of leadership has failed our communities, our societies, and our planet. What we need are new economic models — not “kinder” versions of capitalism but fundamentally different structures. Do they already exist? Our research suggests yes. But they are fragile and often unseen. I talked about the interim findings of the research:

1. Not made for them.
While women’s work matched the principles of social enterprise — trading for purpose, reinvesting profit — the structures surrounding the sector often did not. “It felt like trying to wear someone else’s shoes,” one told me. Their collaborative, place-based ways of working were dismissed as “soft” or “not investment ready.” Here I found resonance with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who contrasted the engineer (top-down, abstract design) with the bricoleur (resourceful, creative, working with what is at hand). The women I spoke to were bricoleurs, remaking governance and accountability on their own terms.

2. Rethinking growth.
Instead of turnover or market share, these women spoke of rhizomatic growth: like a root system, spreading sideways, sending up new shoots. As one said: “I don’t want to grow an empire. I want to plant a forest.” Growth, for them, meant resilience and connection, not empire-building.

3. The cost of care.
Care was central to their leadership — and costly. They took midnight calls, absorbed trauma, carried grief. Funders often failed to see this as leadership at all. Exhaustion and burnout were common, not because of personal weakness but because of systemic failure to value care as the foundation of resilience.

4. Exploitation masked as inclusion.
Grassroots organisations were asked to host people with the most complex needs, without the funding to match. “They get the funding. We get the people,” one said. This is not inclusion; it is exploitation. Yet their responses were constructive — building peer networks, challenging funders, reshaping inclusion itself.

5–6. Lived experience as leadership.
Many women were themselves living with disability, chronic illness, or trauma. Far from barriers, these experiences shaped more humane, flexible, and inclusive organisations. They remind us that care is not accommodation but innovation.

7. The ideological struggle.
The merger that created Social Enterprise Scotland symbolised, for many, the dominance of a corporate vision of the sector. Here I returned to Raymond Williams, who defined culture as “a whole way of life.” If social enterprise is part of that cultural fabric, it cannot be reduced to market metrics. It must be understood as designing and sustaining the ways of life we want to inhabit.

8. Networking as care.
Traditional networking felt exclusionary. So these women built their own: safe, relational, informal spaces where the question was not “what can I get?” but “what can we build together?”

Three surprises stood out.

• First, most women-led social enterprises were profoundly cultural. They resisted the label “artist,” but in Williams’s sense of culture, their work — storytelling, textiles, gardening, food, rituals — was artistry, designing futures.
• Second, exclusion was almost universal: BME men, LGBTQ+ leaders, neurodivergent leaders, younger and older alike all described feeling unsafe or illegitimate.
• Third, I witnessed transformation in the interviews themselves. Women began tentative, even apologetic. But once truly listened to, they emerged as powerful, visionary leaders. Which raises a sharp question: how many leaders are lost because they never get the chance to feel safe enough to show up?

Intersectionality

Intersectionality cannot be a footnote. Ethnic minority entrepreneurs face systemic barriers; disabled and neurodivergent leaders are excluded from transactional spaces; LGBTQ+ leaders experience both precarity and the creative energy of queer spaces. The through-line is clear: mainstream frameworks do not know how to hold these leaders. And yet, when they are held — when they are listened to, when the space is safe — what emerges is extraordinary.

A Call to Action

The good news is that the models we need are already here. The bad news is that they are fragile, constantly threatened by a single narrative of “success” — scale, turnover, replication — the very narrative that brought us to the brink.

Our task is urgent:

• Distinguish these models.
• Learn from them.
• Champion them.
• Resource them.

Because if we lose them now, at 87 seconds to midnight, we do not have time to rebuild.

Closing Reflection

To give the Muhammad Yunus Lecture was to stand in the tradition of a man who recognised that the most marginalised are often those most able to transform their communities. That is what I see in the WISE research: women social entrepreneurs in Scotland showing us how to build economies of care, resilience, and imagination.

Here I return to Antonio Gramsci, who wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” At 87 seconds to midnight, we are indeed living in such a moment. The engineered systems are crumbling. New models, rooted in care and culture, are struggling to be born.

The women I spoke with are not the monsters. They are the midwives. And it was an honour to bring their voices into that room.

You can watch the lecture in full on Youtube, below.