Just a brief Friday SSE news update to point out that:

– Our Liverpool SSE is recruiting social entrepreneurs (see Activities and News), and our Hampshire, Devon and Yorkshire and Humber SSEs will soon. Keep your eyes peeled. Overseas, our Australia SSE is recruiting for its block programme in Sydney to start in September. Get in touch with the local/regional SSE in question for more info in each case via the links above.

– SSE Fellow Chris Dabbs's organisation, Unlimited Potential, has become the first organisation (and I believe the first SSE Fellow) in the North-West to win the Social Enterprise Mark. See the full news story. Unlimited Potential provides innovative health and wellbeing services, and was given the award by Social Enterprise Ambassador Daniel Heery (who's been blogging like a demon of late)

– Congratulations also to SSE Fellow Ros Spearing, whose organisation Ebony Horse Club won the Beyond Sport London Legacy Award this week. Which means not only recognition at a prestigious global event, and a presentation from Mayor Boris Johnson, but also £60,000 over 3 years

– Finally, SSE is currently recruiting 3 posts at its centre in the UK. So please check out the adverts and job specifications via the newspage

More on Beyond Sport, the new Social Enterprise Live website, the Social Earth video page and much more soon…..

Just wanted to capture some quick reflections on the two days of Shine 09. Am sure there will be more over the next few days, + more photos and videos to be uploaded.
Overall, as one of the co-founders and organisers (SSE), I'm pretty delighted with how it went. Massive congrats and thanks to Sam, Lizzie and all at Germination for all their hard work in making the event a reality, and one that ran pretty smoothly. And all on a shoestring budget.

The four partners started the event because they felt there was a need for an accessible, affordable, practical, well-networked, dynamic event that was less about long powerpoints and plenary speeches, and more about one-to-one support and moving your business on. I really think Shine 09 delivered on that concept, and, overall, it felt like more 'business' was being done at the event than last year. Or, as Cliff Prior (UnLtd CEO) summarised to me, Shine 08 was about inspiration, Shine 09 was about perspiration…or about implementation. I saw a couple of SSE Fellows walking out at the end of Friday and they were listing the work they'd got, the contacts made, and the practical advice they'd received…which was very much music to my ears.

Highlights for me on the Friday were the 1:1 areas, where organisations like Lovells, Futurebuilders, UnLtd, Ashoka and ourselves got little respite from social entrepreneurs thirsty for advice and information. Some of the workshop sessions were a little more mixed, going on anecdotal feedback, but I heard positive things about the Mind MOT session and Jackie Westlake's DCLG session(s) in particular.

On Saturday, the vibe was relaxed and enjoyable, and What If gave a load of bespoke consultancy to those who were there (and booked in). The Social Collaboration game was great, and its hypothetical MP expenses endowment fund almost became a Twitter hoax, before being stopped in its tracks. Finally, the pitching session was great, with four excellent projects, and the judging panel giving supportive and constructive feedback (though I say so myself). Martin Sherrard won the popular vote, and an UnLtd Level 1 Award, for his walled kitchen garden project.

 As ever, we will learn from this year and the things that went well and that didn't. The balance between structured and unstructured felt good this year, and the Kings Place and the Hub Kings Cross were stellar venues. The only challenge with Kings Place was the split levels (which meant it felt slightly less of "one event" together) and lack of natural light in the downstairs rooms, but it's a great and well-resourced place to have an event. The Hub has a great vibe and, as at Kings Place, the staff and team there could not have been more helpful and accommodating.

Final big thanks to all who made it possible: Germination as I mentioned above, the funders and sponsors (Lovells, Futurebuilders, CCLA, DCLG, OTS et al), the media partners, the founding partners (especially Ben@Ashoka, Jonathan@theHub, Cliff and Nic@UnLtd), all the volunteer UnConsultants and helpers, David Wilcox for this site, and to all the social reporters and twitterers who helped make the event one that others could be involved in even from miles away.

Till next year then… ;0) and check out the Shine Social Reporter site for all the posts, videos, tweets from this weekend.

It's late on Friday but I have to briefly write about yesterday's London graduation event, which was a huge success. I'll post more photos and reports next week, but I wanted to add my congratulations to the 40-odd social entrepreneurs who completed the programme yesterday and joined the SSE Fellowship. In two rooms at Coin Street's Neighbourhood Centre (thanks to Iain Tuckett and his team for all their assistance), the students gave 4 minute presentations about their project, themselves and their time at SSE. This could, of course, be a recipe for death by powerpoint, but it was a great and inspiring afternoon.

Thanks especially to all those who came along: this was officially the first SSE event where it was standing room only at the end! And thanks also to Kevin Brennan MP, the Minister for the Third Sector (pictured), who gave his time to welcome the Fellows and hand them their certificates (which was something of a marathon effort!), as well as announce the starting of two new SSE franchises (in Yorkshire and the South East) as a result of the recent OTS investment. More on this soon. Special thanks also to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP who supported the event, as well as our team throughout the year.

There was a great mix in the room of funders, policymakers, practitioners, friends and family, board members and others, and a really great vibe for the whole 3 hours or so. We've been inundated with positive feedback all day ("the love was bouncing off the walls"; "we were bowled over" etc), so the smiles are wide in the office and, I hope, on the faces of the social entrepreneurs.

You can find details of them all via this article, but you can also (thanks to the brilliant and generous David Wilcox) see some short videos on his Social Reporter site: Grassroots inspiration from graduating social entrepreneurs

A great end to a great week, and a great year for all those involved.

I'm a self-confessed Skoll World Forum veteran, having attended all six. Which must mean a lifetime achievement award or something is due sooner or later. I can even remember when it was free (!) and there was a filing cabinet in the centre of the lobby to organise meetings. So I approach the event each year with a mixture of excitement (at the networking / opportunities) and trepidation (at its full-on nature), mixed with a small dash of paracetamol (or Advil, for US readers)…because like many conferences, the good stuff happens in the bar, in the pub and over a glass of something or other.

First up, before I get going, check out everyone else! There is a huge amount of coverage online. My tips for the top to start with would be:

– Social Edge where many of the sessions are listenable / viewable online
– Nat Whittemore over at SocialEntrepreneurship.Change.Org (nice to meet you in person, Nat), who took a bunch of interesting video interviews
– FastCompany
– Social Enterprise Magazine
– Ashoka at SWF

But if you search for swf09 or #swf09 (esp. on twitter), you'll find loads. Indeed, for me, this was the event where I really began to understand the full potential of Twitter. So apologies to those following us at @SchSocEnt for the deluge that followed. But it was fascinating to see an alternative conversation and cross-session dialogues going on; questions from someone next door being asked; critiques from people thousands of miles away; dry humour to undercut the worthiness. See here for someone who writes about it better. Or Peter Deitz from Social Actions who said that "Frankly, there are two conferences going on: one for the tweeters and
one for everyone else….The twittering delegates are
having a distributed conversation with people here and around the
world. The others aren't." Never thought I'd both agree with and understand that sentiment.

Of the planned sessions, I enjoyed the Kiva-GlobalGiving-MyC4 one the most; you may have heard of the first two, but MyC4 was a great find (as was Mads, its founder); another portal for channelling loans and investment to businesses / small scale entrepreneurs. He was also the most 'challenging' member of the panel, acknowledging the need to consider greater collaboration / possible merging, and challenging the Kiva co-CEO to say how much he earned last year (didn't necessarily agree with him on either, but at least he was prepared to divert from the norm). And, of course, these were great practitioner organisations.

Elsewhere, I found sessions on leadership and social capital markets to be dry, occasionally enlightening and fairly frustrating. A familiar malaise of Skoll is to have too many speakers on a panel, not chair them well (so they overrun), and then have little time for questions and answers…that's a problem with lots of conferences, of course, but I guess more so at Skoll because they have such a rich guest list to choose from. But reducing the Q and A also makes for a safer event: no-one challenging someone from UBS heading up a leadership session, for example, or questioning whether, given the collapse in private equity and investment banking, we should be mimicking their models, still, in the social space.

More creative spaces to get practitioners, academics, funders etc learning and working together would add to the mix. Indeed, one of the best sessions for me was straight after the final plenary, where the Skollars (see what they did?) hosted a networking session, having lured us in with wine. It was random (in terms of who you sat with), fairly open (in what you could talk about) and led to some really interesting debates and discussions. We had students, funders, practitioners (incuding the amazing Mothers2mothers co-founder Gene Falk), support/learning agencies (including ourselves and INSEAD) all around one table, and it was fascinating.

Of course, Brits tend to find the standing ovations and awards a bit much for our cynical, repressed selves, so there was also some good home turf networking to be found in pubs nearby whilst the opening / awards were going on (though apparently Ken Blecher + KT Tunstall were great, if you're seeking out highlights online). One of my main highlights, though, was in the bar of the Malmaison at about 2am, meeting David Bornstein (who wrote "How to Change the World"); what a nice, engaging guy, with really great knowledge of this field.

And then, before you knew it, it was all over for another year and back, a little, to reality…to take lessons and learning, to follow up networks and leads, to decipher the jargon, to unload a hundredweight of business cards, to remember good people (Jessica, Rod, Ben, Artur, Richard, Sat, Nigel, Liam, Sean, Jessica (2), Sam, et al), to come back with renewed inspiration, to come back with renewed belief in what SSE is doing…and to remember why I've been five times before.