You may be asking yourself, “why would we need the Arc or social enterprises, if the United Nations was fully funded?” The answer might not be so obvious at first, but it helps if we examine the goals the UN aims to achieve versus the goals of initiatives such as social enterprises or the Arc. The UN has four main goals: first, it aims to maintain peace throughout the world; second, it aims to develop friendly relations among nations; third, to help nations work together to improve the lives of poor people, to conquer hunger, disease and illiteracy, and to encourage respect for each other’s rights and freedoms; forth, to be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations to achieve these goals.

On the other hand, social enterprises and the Arc aim to improve the life of people living in many of the lesser developed countries from improving the lives of those living in less favorable communities. Social entrepreneurs and people involved in the Arc try finding solutions to problems where other people would otherwise just turn a blind eye because of the difficulty it would involve if they tried solving it.

To summarize, the UN tries to solve problems at a larger scale such as national or international, while the Arc Initiative or social enterprises try to solve problems are a smaller scale such as those in certain communities or help certain individual.

References:

http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/Global_Reach/ARC_Initiative/About_ARC

http://skollworldforum.org/about/what-is-social-entrepreneurship/

http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/index.shtml