It's been a gallivanting around kind of time of late, and much to reflect on, not least meeting up with Peter "Sunlight" Holbrook and Jonathan "The Hub" Robinson in the last week or so, two very different but passionate social entrepreneurs. I felt like I learned a great deal from both….will blog on this soon.
SSE was also invited to lecture on Roskilde University's MA at its Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, so I headed out to Copenhagen this weekend (Roskilde is just outside the city). It was an amazingly huge campus: reminded me a bit of Warwick University with its vast swathe of concrete buildings (the taxi driver and I had some fun finding "pavillion 10"; he was also responsible for the "there's no poor people in Denmark" comment, btw) but it was also completely empty (it being a Saturday), so all a bit freaky at first. Thankfully, I found the group I was speaking to (along with Roger Spear from the Open University, who was a welcome and friendly face: we had an interesting chat about different pieces of research) and ventured forth.
Always a bit strange as a practitioner 'lecturing' on a course which is primarily academic and theoretical in its approach. I got the feeling that they probably knew considerably more than me, but hopefully my thoughts (on where new entrants to social entrepreneurship come from + how to engage them; and, separately, on future trends) were useful. It was useful for me to crystallise and build on some thinking we have been doing recently around this, and to draw together some work from OTS (their COI research report on Social Enterprise at the Crossroads segments where new entrants/actors might come from), some recession-focused tools for Fellows, some thinking on future trends and other policy work. It's a little hodgepodge, maybe, but here's the slideset that went with the words / workshops etc:
It was great, also, to chat to, debate with and meet some of the Danish social entrepreneurs (because there are genuine social entrepreneurs on the programme as well), not least a guy called Thomas who set up the Danish version of the Big Issue and has been hugely involved in the Homeless World Cup and Homeless Football League in Denmark. Inspiring guy: and good restaurant recommendations as well ;0)
