Category Archives: Learning

Social entrepreneurs in Fife: Tracey, Frankie, Alfie and Kathleen

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FifeDartington It’s been a great and amazing couple of days, reaffirming why I love working in this field, and what it can achieve. Wednesday included a ‘webinar’ on using social media with Fellows dialling in from across the UK and Australia, which went well despite the expected digital glitches; and also a session with one of the new London programmes (see who are on the Block and Weekly programmes here; profiles are gradually being filled in!) on problem tree analysis….which is more interesting and practically useful than it might sound.

Today, I was invited to attend and speak at the SSE Fife graduation of their latest programme, under the banner Motivate to Innovate. Fife was our first SSE franchise, and BRAG, where it’s based, have been a trusted, committed, supportive and, at times, forgiving partner. What John, Dodie, Callum (in picture, left, with several of Fife programme) and, especially, Tracey have achieved over the years in Lochgelly, Fife, and now across other parts of Scotland, is incredibly impressive. They themselves have demonstrated so many of the characteristics the graduating students spoke about today: resilience, support, drive, persistence, commitment, determination, resourcefulness.

The social entrepreneurs graduating today were a typical SSE mix of projects, ages, genders and backgrounds; do check them out. They each spoke about the importance of the support of their peers, and of other networks they tapped into; of how this was a journey of confidence and self-awareness and belief as well as skills and knowledge; and of how hard it was, but also how rewarding. Or as Lorna, one of the new Fellows, put it, “It’s been tough; but worth it”. There were tears, laughter and a great deal of inspiration at the event today.

I also caught up with Frankie, SSE Fellow and Executive Director of Recycle Fife. He came in to support these newest Fellows, and told me that things are going well, with almost 40 staff now working at the organisation, and several potential new eco-developments coming up: he’s got countless great ideas, but he’s also proven he and the RF team can implement them. He also pointed out to me that their success is as much about the people they work with, train, and employ as it is the environmental benefits (around 1120 customers; diverts around 180 tonnes per month from landfill). He talked to me about a guy called Alfie who is now working in his first ever job, aged 48, at Recycle Fife; at first, they didn’t have the money to take him on, so he volunteered for 11 months, worked with the organisation on some of the things that had been a barrier in the past, and is now a few months into gainful employment. You can fill in the blanks on the change that brings in someone’s life.

I will finish by briefly mentioning Kathleen, one of the social entrepreneurs who graduated today. She outlined the challenges and traumas in her background, the things she had overcome, and the journey she and her kids had been on over the last 8 or 9 years. Having gone back through education, rebuilt her home life, retrained, and re-oriented herself, she is now committed to supporting and helping others: setting up an organisation that provides therapies for those going through similar experiences. I can’t really get across how powerful her presentation was, how impressive her journey is, or how the room was hanging on her every word; suffice to say that she had to ask for tissues half way through, and there were plenty of other less-than-dry eyes.

I come away inspired and humbled. As I said to the new Fellows, I’ve attended a few events recently where a mixture of management consultants, venture capitalists, MBA students and politicians have propounded their views on why social enterprise and social entrepreneurs are important, and setting forth their views on what all this stuff is about. I'm glad those conversations are happening. But today reaffirmed that, for me at least, it is at its heart about people. People like Tracey, Frankie, Alfie and Kathleen.

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The real deal social entrepreneurs in Yorkshire

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Great to go and visit our Yorkshire and Humber SSE today, and not just because East Coast trains do free wi-fi (hooray)…but also much more importantly to get a catch-up on how the first programme is going up there, and to meet with three current students currently being supported.
What was great for me was that the relatively dry, formal points I had been making in the first part of the conversation were vividly brought to life by the real examples the social entrepreneurs brought up as they spoke. Here’s some examples of what I mean.

1) Formal version (me): “Social entrepreneurs build trusted relationships, form partnerships and gain practically useful contacts as a result of being together on the programme”

Real-world: John, who’s working on a project to build trust and improve relationships between neighbours, is now working with two other Y+H SSE students (Jay and Justine: there must be some sort of J cubed or 3J name in the offing) whose work complements his. Namely, a platform is built to get neighbours interacting (by John); recycled PCs (from Jay) enable people to get online more easily; and video stories (by Justine) provide content and evaluation material to demonstrate impact. As John put it, this makes it more of a package that has more value and is easier to sell.

2) Formal version (me again): “SSE gives them the time and space to reflect on what they are doing, in a trusted environment with like-minded people”

Real-world: Mani was talking about how his hip-hop empowerment work in schools had really taken off, and that he was massively busy in the day-to-day. He said that the SSE ‘forced’ him to take a step back, think about what he might have missed or forgotten, and bounce ideas / problems off other people. Otherwise he would have carried on going continuously at 100 mph.

3) Formal version (guess who): “The 18-20 students come from a diverse range of backgrounds, and bring a varied range of experiences, networks, information and skills to the group”

Real world: Chris, who’s just won a couple of awards (see here for more on him and Mani winning awards), and works on fuel poverty and eco-efficiency with housing associations was talking about how he came very much from a commercial business background. It was a chance meeting that led him into the world of social and ethical business, and he’d joined the SSE partly to get “a bit more of the social bit of social entrepreneur”. He added that he’d learned a great deal from people in the group, who he might otherwise never have met or taken time with.

Pleasure to see them and learn a great deal from them too.

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Mentoring social entrepreneurs

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At the recent Cornwall SSE graduation event, Tim Smit urged the social entrepreneurs in front of him to not just find themselves a mentor, but to demand one: he views it as that important. And there is no doubt that social entrepreneurs can learn a huge amount from their peers who are a little further on in their journey, or from those with significant reach, networks and experience (and who've made plenty of mistakes, of course). We also seek to match with those from other sectors, working with corporates to create what are genuinely mutually beneficial mentoring relationships…many of which endure beyond their supposed time limits.

It's partly about credibility, partly about an independence that the mentor has (the entrepreneur can be open), partly about an exchange of knowledge and skills but, ultimately, about developing a long-term trusted relationship; which, as we've written here before, is crucial for social entrepreneurs seeking to earn legitimacy and gain credibility in what they do.

Following on from that, it's worth drawing attention to the great series of posts about mentoring that have been written by the Social Enterprise Ambassadors. There are nuggets of gold in here, so do check them out. I particularly liked what Claudine Reid had to say about how mentors can model behaviour (and support when times are hard in your social enterprise) and Dai Powell's insight, based on his personal experience, that "effective mentors can come from anywhere and if it is to be effective,
mentoring should be without reference hierarchies or power structures".

Finally, if you haven't heard about it already, you can win 2 hours mentoring with an Ambassador in a competition running till the end of March. Here's the promo from John Bird:

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Working with Young People: a peer learning session

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YPedit2Just two days ago, the SSE was able to organise a learning session that not only transformed the way individuals thought about young people, but how to work with these young people to define and work towards common goals. This is how it went:
It began during my first week in the SSE office (January 4-9). One of my responsibilities was to ensure that we would have “at least 10 participants” for the event to be successful. Estimating that over half of those who RSVP would not show up, Cynthia advised me to confirm around or as close to 25 as I could.

Nervous at first, I became quite comfortable with the recruiting tasks and communicating with those interested in attending this event. Through countless inbound and outbound e-mails, I had an RSVP list of 34, with 6 more on a Wait List by 20 January, the end of the timeframe I was given. It was a success so far: some were not convinced and as YPedit1a challenge, Cynthia and my fellow intern Matt decided to put a “Full English Breakfast” on the line at a local greasy spoon for who could estimate how many of the 34 would attend. I suppose I knew more information than the others, but regardless, that full English breakfast was delightful. 

Returning to the event, we had twenty-eight participants (including myself and Rosie Ferguson’s young colleague) which packed the Michael Young room like a can of sardines. Prior to the start of the learning session, we had a glorious buffet of cold meats, cheeses, breads, salYPedit3ads, and vegetables catered by SSE’s very own CMN (Cynthia-Matt-Nick) Catering. The session then commenced and London Director of London Youth Rosie Ferguson took the floor and facilitated both the workshop through both large group and small group discussions about “how to engage young people once they’re on board.”

Within the discussions participants often tied working with youth with ideas of partnerships and sponsorships, stereotypes and generalisations, and the balance of professionalism and personality needed to build the bridge between young people and the entrepreneurial world. We were also able to do real-life case studies of each other’s projects and organisations in terms of how we meet the needs of our 6 P's (People, Place, Price, Promotion, Philosophy, and Product) and how our organisations are only as strong as the weakest of these elements.

Overall, the learning session was a huge success thanks to all of the recruiting work done by Cynthia, all of those who helped spread the word about the event, Capacity Builders for supporting the event, Rosie Ferguson for sharing her knowledge and experience, and all the participants for being extremely engaged in the discussions.

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Connected: why different networks are crucial for social entrepreneurs

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Connected Was fascinated reading an article in the paper this weekend, entitled "Are your friends making you fat", which is all about research that demonstrates the influence of friends in your network on how you live and work. Like all the best books of this type, Connected seems at its heart to be based on a very obvious idea: that social networks affect our behaviour more powerfully than we tend to acknowledge. Be that in becoming obese, taking up (or quitting) smoking, or what we wear.

For me, the article became more interesting when it started to talk about how the success of projects or initiatives might depend on different types of networks. For example, the article discusses the success of a broadway musical:

Christakis tells the story of a friend of his, Brian Uzzi, who has used
the impact of social networks to analyse the success or otherwise of
Broadway musicals. "He finds that if the key players – the director,
costume designer, sound person, producer, etc – all worked together
before, and everyone knows everyone else, then the show is a flop. He
also finds that if you put together a group of people, who have never
worked together before, the show is also a flop. But if you put
together a group of people some of whom have worked together and some
who haven't, then the show is a runaway critical success with enormous
financial rewards."

This got me thinking about what I often say in presentations about SSE and why we attempt to put together a diverse group of social entrepreneurs in a cohort, and the importance of the network they develop in terms of resource, opportunity, support and experience. It's also worth reflecting on this when thinking about the type of organisation you build and the mix of skills + trust that is needed.

Later on in the piece, the researcher (Nicholas Christakis) discusses this in a different evolutionary context:

"If you want to hunt a mastodon," Christakis says, "it's really good if
all your friends know each other because you can work closely together
to kill it. But if you want to find a mastodon, it's much
better if your friends don't know each other – because they'll all have
the same information. If you don't know your friend's friend, the
chances are he will be able to tap more distant regions of the network."

I think this is potentially fascinating from a social entrepreneur's point of view, and demonstrates why networks can be so important to success.

For example, in the early stages of researching and establishing a new organisation (or 'finding a mastodon' in this context), a social entrepreneur needs information, expertise, inspiration, support and knowledge from a variety of sources. That's when the cohort of like-minded, supportive people who don't know each other beforehand can come into play, along with the networks of witnesses and staff they come into contact with at SSE.

Then, when it's about running the organisation, and building and mobilising a community of support behind it (or 'killing the mastodon'), it is those who share the same mission + are part of the same group or team who can play a key role in making that happen. The ability and confidence of the social entrepreneur to build that community + team around them, and to 'bring people with them'  on the journey is then pivotal.

Get both of those networks right, and those mastodons won't have a chance there'll be plenty more successful entrepreneurs and organisations to be influenced by.

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