This week seems to have been a little bit quiet in the world of social enterprise. They say that no news is good news, but I can tell you that it does make writing a newsletter a very difficult job. So this is a real hodgepodge of stuff, a little bit of social enterprise news followed by ‘things I have seen this week that you may find useful’.
Have a good weekend
I need your help please. It’s that time of the year when we run our annual training survey, which is your chance to influence the courses that we run at SSE over the next year. If you complete the survey, you could win one of three free places on the one-day workshop of your choice. Your input is really appreciated, and the survey shouldn’t take longer than 10 minutes to complete. Go on, do it as a favour to me. You can find the survey here.
Once you’ve filled the survey in, and if you are feeling particularly generous and you are on Twitter, click this link to help us spread the survey far and wide. Thank you!
The British Council have published ‘Social enterprise in the UK: Developing a thriving social enterprise sector‘. It’s pretty comprehensive, covering everything from finance through to social impact and available support.
The rather cool sounding Lambeth Firesouls have put together a useful post examining alternatives to grant funding.
Social Enterprise UK have put together a Buy Social Gift Guide, perfect if you are starting your Christmas shopping this weekend. (Or you could buy someone a place on one of our workshops. I could cobble together some sort of gift card…)
A question that I regularly find myself pondering is ‘could beer drinking save the Great Barrier Reef? And now there is a social enterprise that wants to answer the question for me. This is an experiment that I am more than happy to help out with.
Congratulations to SSE Fellow Caro Warwick-Evans whose organisation The Cornish Seaweed Company picked up Cornish Business of the Year at The Hub Awards 2015.
“How to save yourself from a bad startup idea that looks good” has some really good ideas around product development. It’s written from a tech point of view but it translates really well into any new product or service that you could be developing.
Here’s where things start to get a little bit random. This week I subscribed to Highbrow, which provides ‘free bite-sized courses delivered to your inbox every morning’. It covers all sorts – history, philosophy, literature etc. I’ve only received a couple of emails so far but it seems pretty good. File this under the personal development section of the news.
This has nothing to do with social enterprise at all but I’d be amazed if you don’t find it useful. Smallpdf is a web based service which allows you to convert pdfs back into word documents so that you can edit them. It’s magic!
Coming up at SSE
- Kickstart Your Social Media Strategy, SSE London, 21st January
- Crowdfunding for Social Enterprises, SSE London, 27th January
- An Introduction to Legal Structures, SSE London, 28th January
- Leadership Development, SSE London, starts 17th February
- Replication and Social Franchising, SSE London, starts 25th January
