Social Enterprise, Homelessness, and Neoliberal Logics

This chapter focuses on two social enterprises, Café Art and Accumulate, which utilise models of social entrepreneurship in their creativity-focused projects with people affected by homelessness. It examines the inherent ideological ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that emerge when combining neoliberal values of business enterprise, consumer markets, and competition with social change agendas. Specifically, it examines two projects using socially committed arts processes to generate products: Café Art’s annual MyLondon calendar (2013–) and Accumulate’s graphic memoir The Book of Homelessness ( Cumber, 2020a ). The chapter considers how the creative processes and labour undertaken to generate these products provide supported outlets for creativity that directly impact participants’ sense of autonomy, agency, and self-esteem and invite new ways for them to engage with and claim ownership of their place in the city, their narratives, and creative identities. It offers a detailed analysis of the textual, visual, and affective modes of engagement central to these cultural artefacts to reveal how they offer new cultural imaginaries of homelessness.