80,000 Hours is a website that features a team of Oxford graduates/undergraduates as they develop choices, of career, of lifestyle and direction of travel towards the social economy, or not.

The number of hours represent the average spent by professionals in the course of their working lives. Being committed to social business and enterprise, that not only fosters ethical, equal and fraternal business activity, should be a clear and distinct choice mapped against the drivers of our sector.

This short film, below, offers the 80,000 Hours view of students and graduates and how a commitment to the social economy has changed their life. In the 80k Hours model, pursuit of social outcome and a triple bottom line for your start-up are not two mutually exclusive ambitions.

In the East Midlands should the option to develop a Social Business model, regardless of sector start-up choice, be a readily available and well informed choice? We think so. Oxford cannot be the only centre of academe where social mores and ethical sustainability of enterprise will resonate.

The choice of Social Business as a paradigm for success should be an obvious career pathway in mainstream post-academic life. But these choices are not without conflict. The 80k Hours philosophy has, so far, been intimately linked to the Earning to Give model.You can see another short film and an explicatory narrative about Earning to Give on these 80k Hours web pages.

High paying careers in traditional business sectors, where wealth creation is shared with good causes, may seem an ideal solution to well educated graduates. However, if the core giving is funding by non-ethical, non-inclusive, non-sustainable activity, like arguments about carbon- offset, where is the real benefit to be found?

You can see a well argued case for and against the Earning to Give model on the LessWrong community blog here…

Rather the whole embrace of the Social Business sector, where values, community support and sustainability are embedded in the delivery of surplus generation – we would argue, should be the best model.

Lets start a movement to encourage tertiary education institutions, undergraduates and graduates in our region, to actively consider Social Business frameworks as an imaginative, viable and wholly satisfying career choice. Delivering the third sector on steroids in fact, across the next two generations of enterprise activity.

This project may even be fundable?