Monthly Archives: October 2007

Friday round-up: Give Big, play Footsey, scale up, drink Fairtrade McDonald’s coffee…

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As the champagne corks pop for the weekend, here’s the round-up of news and links:

– Bill Clinton’s been in town promoting his book, Giving, but of equal interest might be The Big Give website for potential donors….

– Social enterprise is on the curriculum in schools from September 2008. Those of you who did Business Studies at school will no doubt have your own opinions about whether this is a good or bad thing….

– SSE is heading up to Footsey later in October: see you there, people….CAN are also having a ‘Scaling Social Enterprise‘ event on October 30th; we’re on our residential, but looks like a good event

– The evening before Footsey is the Enterprising Solutions Awards, which should mean a few hangovers on the train to York. Word on the street is that it’s ‘cocktail dress’ (!), so look forward to the great and good being suited and booted.

– The 3rd Sector Minister has been out and about visiting two well-known social enterprises in the East Midlands.

– Get Sustainable Funding in Wales

–  Fairtrade in NY Times and (coffee-wise) used by McDonalds…

Have a good weekend…..

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The Ernst and Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 is…

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…Brett Wigdortz of Teach First. Congratulations to Brett and his team for the award….which you can read more about here on the Business In The Community website. Brett had the misfortune to sit next to me on a plane to a conference once, when I got to know him, and we chatted a lot about Teach First, SSE, replication within the UK, and replication internationally. It was interesting to hear which aspects of his management consultancy background were most useful to his new role, and to hear how the organisation came about. It’s now been going for 5 years, and has certainly played a part (alongside various government-backed salary increases, golden handshakes, advertising) in changing the attitude towards teaching as a profession. Framing it as leadership development, rather than teacher training, and encouraging a collective sense of belonging amongst those who work on the programmes are keys to its success (and reasons why it is likely to endure).

You can read about all the Entrepreneurs of the Year on the E&Y website. I love the headline "Lord Harris of Carpetright is UK Overall Entrepreneur of the Year"…giving the impression that Carpetright is a town or region (arise, Lord Harris of Carpetright). He’s actually Lord Harris of Peckham, and congrats to him as well.

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Do you do the green thing?

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I met up the other day with Rod Schwartz of Catalyst to chat about social entrepreneurs, his trip to the Balkans and SSE. Having taught in a school for the blind in Bulgaria back in the dim and distant past, I was interested to hear about social business / social entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe, and the potential for the movement over there.

In the course of our discussions, Rod mentioned that he was involved with an initiative called ‘Do the Green Thing‘, and that it was launching today….I vaguely remembered signing up to something and, sure enough, got an e-mail through today encouraging me to, well, do the green thing. Which this month is: walk more, drive less. It’s kind of a We Are What We Do meets iCount meets GlobalCool meets TipThePlanet. With extra advertising savvy and web (2.0)-usability thrown in.

They describe it as: "a not-for-profit online community uniting people to act against climate
change. Green Thing’s basic principle is to tempt people to do one
delightful thing a month and so build up a programme of green behaviour
one easy step at a time".

I like it, mostly because it has a sense of humour, a bit of personality and engaging content. Whether it gets (drum roll) critical mass and really takes off remains to be seen, but there’s some smart, plugged-in people behind it. And good use of the blogs/videos/podcasts/audio/wiki stuff out there, without it seeming chaotic (a challenge in itself).

Worth a bit of your valuable time.

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