I’m back and refreshed after a week in the sun. (I am a little tired, I woke up especially early to watch the cricket this morning only to find that England had already lost.) A lot has been going on at SSE recently; congratulations to everyone who graduated from our Fellowship course on Wednesday, another excellent group of social entrepreneurs becoming SSE Fellows. Applications for our Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland Social Entrepreneurs Programme have been streaming in, keep them coming.
Here’s this week’s news:
- We were celebrating last week as our partnership with RSA won ‘Best Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative’ at the CII Public Interest Awards 2015. This is the only surviving photo from the event:
Peter Collins, RSA (left) and Alastair Wilson, SSE (right)
(Check out this video to see how RSA provides support to our students).
- If you are looking for funding and support to grow Big Issue Invest, Fusion and First Ark are running a series of events in March across England, ‘Bigger Together’. They are free to attend.
- Nick Temple examines scale in his latest blog post and proposes five ideas that could help organisations to grow. (‘Examines scale’ makes it sounds like he spent his time looking at a kettle. It’s not that).
- Some cracking blogs from some SSE Fellows this week. Becky John took part in the first day of our Leadership Development course and reflected on the day here. Meanwhile Melanie Glass reflects on her first year running a social enterprise ‘From charity worker to social entrepreneur: the leap of faith‘ Both blogs are well worth a read, particularly if you are thinking of applying for one of our courses and want to get a flavour of SSE.
- The Stephen Lloyd Awards have opened for applications, in memory of lawyer and social pioneer Stephen Lloyd who died earlier this year. Applications for the awards are open until the 10th April and they are ‘particularly interested in supporting ideas that address social problems at a systemic level.’ Further details here.
- Something that a lot of organisations struggle with is pricing (including us, when we first priced our workshops) Ben Yoskovitz has written ‘Experimenting with Product, Price and Market‘ which will go some way to help tackle the issue.
- The Guardian have put together a comprehensive guide on ‘how to write an effective press release‘. (The Small Business Network on the Guardian’s website contains a lot of useful information, it’s well worth checking out).
- If you do issue a press release which then ends up causing a full-scale meltdown, social enterprise Goodwork are running a Crisis Communications course in London on March 6th – if you’d like to go along, mention that you heard about it from the SSE and you’ll get a 10% discount.
- SSE Scotland student Chris Hellawell is shortly launching the Edinburgh Tool Project, providing people with valuable tools and skills for future employment. It’s a neat concept, and you can read all about it here.
- Next week’s Working with Corporates workshop is pretty much sold out now, but we’ve scheduled in another one on September 11th to meet the demand. Find out more here.
Have a good week!
