Charities are being urged to look beyond the "skint" public sector for their funding and do more to generate their own cash.

Ewan Aitken, chief ­executive of the Cyrenians homelessness charity, is calling on the voluntary sector to use the current austerity politics as an opportunity to do things very differently.

The former leader of ­Edinburgh City Council will use a speech in the capital to highlight how social enterprise, which he describes as being "essentially commercial activity that creates profit for the benefit of the parent charity", can be used to generate funding.

While he will say that this could mean voluntary sector organisations entering "the world if not the governance model, of the private sector", he will also stress: "We, and the rest of sector, must not fear being in this place where the driver is profit.

"There are risks involved but the risks of staying wedded to a public-sector contract or even a grant application/corporate-giving model are, in my view, even greater."

Mr Aitken will claim that in Scotland it "feels like that right now we are in a perfect storm of a referendum result that's created far more questions than answers".

Mr Aitken will say: "The only way to face the social and economic problems of the next five years, in particular the desperate consequences of austerity politics, is to see them as an opportunity to do things very differently."