We can observe in recent years an ever-increasing development of Third sector, with a significant support from the public in relation to the benefits it brings to society in terms of welfare. Non-profit Organizations, and particularly the non-profit enterprises such as the Italian social cooperatives, have in common the aim to unite social needs and economic needs. If we observe the crisis in terms of social co-operatives, the “crisis” is not a new phenomenon. With reference to the Italian social cooperatives, for example, we can observe that, over the last decade, in spite of greatly increased turnover, there was a drastic reduction of operating results, with an average net operating profit lower than 1%, compared to 3.5% - 5% of the prior years; over half of the social cooperatives have a net operating loss or a net operating profit lower than 5 thousand euros in 2007. However, the 2003 ISTAT report already showed a situation in which, despite of a period of stagnation or slight growth, the rate of failure for social cooperatives was significantly lower than in other economic sector. Within this scenario, the ISNET report for 2008 confirms a positive correlation between performance and the ability to preserve / start on new relationships. There is a possible way of development that, due to the crises and the needs of innovation, identifies the relationships as a instrument for development. There are many financial intermediaries that have begun to give a weight in the process of credit rating, to factors other than the traditional capital and economic-financial indicators. This is the case, for example, of the level of internal democracy, of the social relations of the company (COSIS, CGM Finance), factors sometimes considered also outside to the Ethical Finance(CFI). This evaluation starts from the conviction that if the company can create value for a territorial community, has strong roots in it, relating to it with a multistakeholdership approach, adopting an open governance, is capable of reconciling the interests of different stakeholders as part of an overall welfare and sustainable development, and so the communities are interested to ensure to this organization a certain rate of social protection that reduces the risk of failure. The recent theoretical debate on corporate social responsibility is characterized by the attribution to this concept of several meanings, including two of particular relevance to our arguments: the first identifies the Csr as a private supply of public goods (in particular, see Bagnoli and Watts, 2003 and Besley and Ghatak, 2006); the second see the social responsibility as the building of a model of multistakeholder governance (Sacconi, 2005, Cespa and Cestone, 2004).

Under these theories, our research aims to investigate the variables that influence the lower risk of business failure in the Third Sector, through a diagram of these variables, and the formulation of hypotheses of variables to replicate in the private sector, trying to answer the question: “Social Enterprise, how contribute to the global crisis resolution?” Traditionally, the non-profit sector observes the profit organizations trying to adapt the tools used in its specific context, seeking to correct market distortions and for interact with those ones that shares the same principles. In this case, it is proposed to reverse the optical traditionally followed to determine if and how the experience of social enterprises can help to provide guidance and useful tools for profit sector to address the crisis.