This summer Gina Lopez, a student at the Clinton School of Public Service, spent time working for Eden Tree, a social enterprise in Accra, Ghana, before spending six weeks volunteering at the School for Social Entrepreneurs in London. Here she looks back at her time in Ghana and examines the growing opportunities for social entrepreneurs. Continue reading
Let me tell you about a man I know….I’ll call him Ralph. When he hit 40, he realised that he’d wasted his life between drink and prison. He couldn’t remember the last real job he’d had. Worst of all he was barely on speaking terms with his teenage son. But now he wanted to change things. Continue reading
June reading with children
We all like a good story and as someone who works with children, I particularly enjoy reading fairy stories to spellbound children. The stories are filled with characters who are good strong leaders and inevitably save the world from evil… Continue reading
In a recent social enterprise debate at the House of Lords, Baroness Scott of Needham Market talked about the support the sector needs. The “dedication and enthusiasm will carry [social entrepreneurs] a very long way, but professional support in finance and business planning, legal frameworks and so on is key, and this is where the school comes in. The Ipswich school [SSE Suffolk] is great, but we need more of this sort of thing right across the country. We also need social enterprises which themselves help other social enterprises”. Continue reading
New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) have just published an interesting article based on the research and evaluation it carried out on SSE's impact. It found that:
"organisations in the sample were 20% more likely to survive for five years than the average UK business, had very high average growth rates (17% annually) and reported continuous growth even during the recession. This is similar to previous studies, including the 2009 Social Enterprise Coalition study that showed that 56% of social enterprises reported an increase in turnover during the recession compared to 62% of charities who reported reductions in funding"
