Been quite a week here at SSE. Both London programmes are sharing a joint study session today: John Bird‘s voice is echoing through the courtyard into our office as I write. And this morning Colin Crooks of Green-Works was the expert witness. Colin’s a great guy: he’s built such an impressive organisation over the last eight years, and he had some interesting things to say over lunch about franchising (a topic we share!), about diversification, about boards and board management, and about growing office recycling in the years to come. And that was just lunch, so I’m assuming the session with the students was enlightening and informative.
Another thing Colin mentioned over lunch was their new(er) work overseas. In particular, they’re doing some extraordinary work in Sierra Leone, where they are basically kitting out a whole town through re-using furniture from the UK: a library, a hospital and 37 schools. Humbling stuff.
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Yesterday we helped facilitate a day for the Social Enterprise Ambassadors which also had some big players in attendance: not only the ambassadors themselves, but also 25 high-ranking civil servants from across different government departments, two ministers (Ed Milband and Phil Hope) and Gus O’Donnell, head of the civil service (as someone said to me, he’s taking time out from running the country). So quite a powerful and intimidating group to work with….but it went well. The programme has taken a while to bed down and to get going (though announced last June, the appointments/launch took place in October-time), and everyone’s committed to making the most of the next two years.
In some ways, the ambassadors programme reminds me a bit of SSE, in that a group of entrepreneurs are, by their nature, not always the easiest group to lead and facilitate….and the group dynamics can take a while to settle (the old forming-storming-norming-performing stuff), particularly when the group doesn’t meet very often, and it’s difficult for all to attend each time. So still a bit of forming and storming yesterday (from some) and more norming (from others). And hopefully performing over the coming months. :0)
Ended the day at the Edge Upstarts Awards. Congratulations to all the winners (who will no doubt appear on the website soon) who included Lily Lapenna of MyBnk, Carmel McConnell of Magic Breakfast, and Forth Sector. And now we’re off to address our sleep deprivation………….
