Read + Co is committed to being integrated into the social economy.
The social economy is an alternative economic model that responds to the increasing social justice, environmental, and economic problems created in local communities under a model of laissez-faire capitalism and rampant globalization. Large segments of the world’s population have already taken matters into their own hands and are providing real-life solutions to these problems.
Straddling the market, the public sector, and the non-profit world, the social economy is pragmatic and people-based and is providing an alternative option for a hopeful future.
The “social” in the “social economy” is twofold: first, that the community has cognition of itself as greater than the sum of its individual parts; second, that all our social and economic structures are conceived of as co-created and recreated through patterns in social life.
Social businesses are one type of model in the social economy. We attempt to offset global priorities of growth, profit, and income for shareholders and instead prioritize social goals and community well-being over pure profit. Their model is one that is grounded in long-term vision, rather than short-term profits, and the understanding that we make our own patterns and take responsibility for our role in them—thus we must choose wisely.
We believe we are responsible to the environment, and we make efforts to reduce our impact. As a social business that is part of the social economy, we are guided by a fundamental desire to live up to that responsibility by being responsive, real, reciprocal, resilient and resistant to the mainstream resource exploitation model.
Read + Co. acknowledges with respect the Lekwungen-speaking peoples on whose traditional territory we work, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.